State power - Coercion, persuasion and consent.

In this lesson we look at the nature of state power. How is the state able to control people, rule over people, make people do what the state wants rather than what the individual wants? For example, I don’t want to give large sums of my hard-earned money to the state, but I agree to pay my taxes. You might not want to go to school but you do. And although humans are genetically predisposed to try to avoid dying, millions of humans have willingly, sometimes happily been prepared to die for their state when ordered to do so. So how does the state do it? The state controls the individual through three distinct mechanisms: coercion, persuasion, and consent. In this introductory lesson I want to look briefly at each of these methods.