Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs.

Tyranny and anarchy are never far asunder