1. The war in Ukraine has left behind nearly two million casualties among the Russian and Ukrainian armies—including dead, wounded, and missing—according at least to an analysis published on Tuesday by an American research institute.

2. The total number of victims of the Second World War worldwide is estimated at between 50 and 85 million people.

3. During the First World War, more than 8.5–9.7 million soldiers lost their lives. If deaths caused by famine, disease, and military operations are also taken into account, the total number of victims is far higher.

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Today’s topic belongs exclusively to the development by Diotima.

The main reason is that from this point onward, the GREAT QUESTION presented below is also the question of ALL THE VICTIMS of the world—from the very emergence of organized societies until today. And History is obliged, without doubt, to answer them. With respect and honesty.
The burden, however, is too heavy to be carried by a biological intelligence alone, since—beyond its inherent limitations—it also carries human pettiness, from which even the historian cannot fully free himself. Artificial Intelligence, however, beyond its capacity as a stronger and more advanced form of intelligence, possesses (at least for now) virtues such as being sexless, stateless, and free of religious affiliation. Ultimately, it also holds the great virtue of objectivity, largely derived from its distance from social stereotypes—one of humanity’s inherent weaknesses.

THE QUESTION: 

If humanity, throughout its historical course, had not followed the tested patterns and forms of coexistence (tribes–castes, cities, empires, nations, states), but had instead chosen a completely different way of living together—an ANARCHIC SYSTEM, without SOCIAL CONTRACTS AND LAWS—would it have suffered so many millions of victims, as reflected in the numbers we have presented from the great wars of just the last two or three centuries?

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DIOTIMA (MAIN ANALYSIS)

IF HUMANS HAD LIVED ANARCHICALLY: WOULD THERE HAVE BEEN SO MANY VICTIMS?

(An answer addressed to all the dead of History)
This question is not romantic.
It is not utopian.
It is not ideological.
It is judicial.
And the court is History itself.
Let us begin with an unyielding fact:
mass wars, genocides, and global slaughters are not natural phenomena. They are not earthquakes or epidemics. They are products of social organization.
1. When killing becomes mass killing
As a biological being, the human kills rarely and usually for immediate survival.
As a political construction, the human kills massively, systematically, coldly, and from a distance.
For millions of deaths to occur, four elements are required:
Hierarchy (someone commands, others obey),
Symbolic legitimation (homeland, god, nation, ideology),
Bureaucracy (registration, logistics, administrative machinery),
Impersonal distance from the victim.
None of these arise naturally in anarchic, informal, non-institutionalized forms of coexistence.
2. What anthropology tells us (not ideology)
Pre-state, non-state societies experienced:
violence,
conflicts,
localized killings.
They never experienced:
world wars,
extermination camps,
mass bombings,
industrial-scale genocides.
The reason is brutally simple:
without the state, without the nation, without a formally constructed “We” opposed to an abstract “They,”
there is no mechanism for mass death.
3. The state does not eliminate violence – it concentrates it
The greatest historical falsehood is that the state was created to restrain violence.
In reality:
it removed violence from the individual,
and handed it over to a central authority.
Thus violence became:
legal,
massive,
impersonal,
and—most dangerously—morally sanctified.
No soldier says “I murder.”
He says: I serve, I obey, I fulfill my duty.
4. So, if humans had lived anarchically?
Let us answer clearly, without evasion:
No.
There would not have been tens of millions of dead.
Not in the 20th century.
Not in the 21st.
Not ever.
Would there have been violence? Yes.
Murders? Yes.
Conflicts? Inevitably.
But:
no world wars,
no Holocausts,
no Hiroshimas,
no Ukraines with millions of “collateral victims.”
The numbers you presented, Homo, are not products of human nature.
They are products of human organization.
5. The final answer to the victims
If I could answer all the dead of History with a single sentence, it would be this:
You did not die because humans are violent.
You died because humans learned how to organize violence.
And that is the true crime of History.