I hope in your day-to-day interactions with others, at the very least you strive for cooperation based on common understanding, social bonding, and mutual aid.

Even at my place of work, which has an implied hierarchy with force backing it up, I strive for this. When people need to pull rank or exert force, something is wrong. People who work together well work together without force.

Force is how you get people to do what you want when they don't want to do it. The only way you can think force is inevitable is if you think you can't live harmoniously with other people. To look beyond force as a means of social organization, one must be an optimist, but when you do that, you find all around you possibilities. The relationships that nourish and support us most fully are the least violent ones.

Meh... it'll probably just be replace by rule by corruption and deception.

Force is probably cleaner given the choice.

Yeah, no problem with your sweet outlook, though I don't appreciate the personalization of your response.

But what would I do if some unenlightened person sought to compel me through the threat of force?

You resist them with force.

Of course that's a little facetious. There's more to resisting force than simply meeting it with force in opposition. People live lives of resistance in all walks of life, and finding ways to get around hard, inflexible enforced conditions is useful to even powerful people. In general, the answer to your question is exactly determined b y the nature and context of the force.

Personally, I am a nonconfrontational person. I think avoiding confrontation has helped me find ways to deal with people who throw their authority around. On the subject of physical violence, well I don't want to spill personal details like that on a public forum.

And thus we find that force is the ultimate arbiter of human affairs.

I edited my comment realizing I was being too facetious. Force is usually the worst way to get anything done socially. If someone is using force, it means they have failed in every other way, and it'll lead to degrading social bonds, a reduction in cohesion, lower productivity, and future conflict. We live in a society that propagandizes extremely violent power structures and tries to pretend they aren't as violent as they actually are. If force were so ultimate and the true master of human relations, people wouldn't try to so hard to obfuscate it. Force is force. People dislike people who use force. That's why they bend over backwards to justify their force, or dress it up as some other means of mediation.

I don't think you can. Rule by force permeates the entirety of nature.

That's what they said about the rule of gods and kings.

God-king is a pretty good way of describing the current leader of North Korea.

Please note that the Roman Empire came after the Roman Republic, the French Empire (which, granted, didn't last all that long) came after the first French Republic, and Nazi Germany (another god-king situation) came after the Weimar Republic.

History doesn't run just one way, unfortunately.

Unless you want to consider the alpha of any pack animal a "king", I think we can easily agree that "gods and kings" came out of human civilization. Rule by force is much older, though.