Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.
It's not obvious why some societies break down early and some go on working.
But if a significant fraction of the population is barely scraping by then they're not willing to be "good" if it means not making ends meet, and when other people see widespread defection, they start to feel like they're the only one holding up their end of the deal and then the whole thing collapses.
This is why the tendency for people to propose rent-seeking middlemen as a "solution" to the tragedy of the commons is such a diabolical scourge. It extracts the surplus that would allow things to work more efficiently in their absence.
That's more like human universals. These behaviors generally manifest to smaller or larger degree, depending on how secure people feel. But those are extremely local behaviors. And in fact, one of them is exactly the thing I'm talking about:
> we organize
We organize. We organize for many reasons, "general living" is the main one but we're mostly born into it today (few got the chance to be among the founding people of a new village, city or country). But the same patterns show up in every other organizations people create, from companies to charities, from political interests groups to rural housewives' circles -- groups that grow past ~100 people split up. Sometimes into independent groups, sometimes into levels of hierarchies. Observe how companies have regional HQs and departments and areas and teams; religious groups have circuits and congregations, etc. Independent organizations end up creating joint ventures and partnerships, or merge together (and immediately split into a more complex internal structure).
The key factor here is, IMO, for everyone in a given group to be in regular contact with everyone else. Humans are well evolved for living in such small groups - we come with built-in hardware and software to navigate complex interpersonal situations. Alignment around shared goals and implicit rules is natural at this scale. There's no space for cheaters and free-loaders to thrive, because everyone knows everyone else - including the cheater and their victims. However, once the group crosses this "we're all a big family, in it together" size, coordinating everyone becomes hard, and free-loaders proliferate. That's where explicit laws come into play.
This pattern repeats daily, in organizations people create even today.
You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions.
Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough.
But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense.
Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again.
(See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.)
NETWORK effect is a real thing
canadians need an anti-imperial radio-canada run alternative. we arent gonna be able to coordinate against the empire when the empire has the main control over the internet.
when the americans come a knocking, we're gonna wish we had chinese radios
It’s easier to explain in those terms than assumptions about how things work in a tribe.
That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, when everyone knows everyone else personally. It breaks down rapidly after that. We compensate for that with hierarchies of governance, which give rise to written laws and bureaucracy.
New tribes break off old tribes, form alliances, which form larger alliances, and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase.
This is sociopolitical history of the world in a nutshell.