The Society of States: Humanity Still in the Stone Age

A Fundamental Illusion

History loves to tell itself as an ascent toward civilization. We repeat that law, morality, and justice have tamed violence and that a global order now protects the weak. This narrative flatters our need for reassurance, but it rests on an original confusion. It projects onto sovereign entities qualities that belong only to individuals bound by a minimal ethic.

The key shift is simple. Consider States not as abstract legal constructs but as collective individuals. Not a metaphor. A real category. States have a will, a language, a memory, a strategy, a pride, a capacity for action, and a ledger of interests. They also possess a privilege individuals do not: near-total immunity from shame and punishment. This systemic absence of moral responsibility places the society of States squarely in an ethical prehistory.

The immediate consequence is clear. If we judge humanity at the scale of its real units of power, we do not live in a civilized world. We live in a coordination of talking predators. Language gives the illusion of maturity, but this language is not anchored in conscience. It is a tool for negotiation, not a structure of truth.

Humanity Divided into Two Species

First species: individuals. They are exposed to shame, remorse, the courts, reputation, social scrutiny, and prison. Their power is limited by the threat of personal sanction and by an internalized sense of wrongdoing. Imperfect as it may be, this constraint alters behavior and installs a rudimentary practical morality.

Second species: State entities. They are sovereign. Their responsibility is diluted in administrative anonymity, changes of leadership, the erosion of time, and the rhetoric of raison d’État. They can bomb, starve, colonize, deny the obvious, rewrite the past, break public promises, and reappear months later with the same diplomatic face. Structural impunity is not an accident. It is a design feature.

What we call the world order is the architecture of this second species. It does not forbid predation. It organizes it, tempers it, allocates it, and justifies it. It rewards skill, not justice. It punishes clumsiness, not wrongdoing. It values power, not truth.

Lying as a Vital Organ

For an individual, lying is a definable wrong. There is a lie, a liar, a victim, and a possible punishment. For a State, lying becomes a vital function. It serves to test the balance of power, to buy time, to mask a violation, to prepare a reversal of alliances, to manufacture internal consent.

Modern diplomacy does not require truth. It requires tactical consistency. A statement is not a commitment. It is a move. A denial is not a conflict with reality. It is a maneuver. The production of experts, reports, and resolutions is not necessarily a search for clarity. It is often the management of optics and the patience of others.

The decisive point lies here. A State cannot be humiliated like an individual. It does not blush. It does not lose face in the moral sense. It never meets the gaze of a higher authority that can condemn it and impose an unavoidable sentence. Without a universal moral authority to hold them accountable, lying is rational for States and becomes a survival organ.

The UN as the Final Fiction

The United Nations looks like a court. It has halls, rituals, declarations, resolutions, and special envoys. But its heart, the Security Council, grants absolute privilege to five powers with veto rights. A single hand can block all enforcement. The form is judicial. The substance is oligarchic.

This architecture mimics law but rarely produces justice. Without an impartial judge, without a supranational enforcer, without an automatic execution mechanism, the whole system functions as a political liturgy. The world comes here seeking absolution, a narrative of respectability, a certificate of honorability. Belief in civilization is renewed in this theater, while the material structure of power remains untouched.

The gravest issue lies elsewhere. By elevating form to the status of an idol, the UN neutralizes the urgency of real reform. The symbol is enough to calm the conscience. We confuse the representation of justice with justice itself. We mistake common speech for common law. We mistake the stage for the law.

Alliances and Morality in Structural Divorce

A worthy human being chooses friends according to justice. A State chooses allies according to interest. It will support a tyrant if it stabilizes a border. It will sell arms to a future enemy if it creates useful dependence. It will finance a dictator if he offers a strategic relay. This is not individual cynicism. It is systemic logic.

International relations are pre-moral by nature. They precede morality and do not recognize it as a constraint. Universal principles enter only as mobilizable rhetoric. They serve to legitimize a choice already made according to the calculation of risks and gains. When symbolic cost outweighs advantage, values are invoked. When advantage outweighs cost, reality is invoked.

Demanding ethics in alliances without transforming the responsibility structure of States is like asking a predator to adopt the diet of an herbivore. The architecture does not allow it. Language can pretend. The mechanisms do not change.

The Vertigo of Naked Truth

This is not a call for better international communication. It is not a proposal for procedural reform. It is an ontological diagnosis. Civilization, as we display it, concerns primarily individuals domesticated by criminal law and social scrutiny. The collective structure remains bestial.

The thing must be named without varnish. States are abstract persons endowed with language and devoid of personal conscience. They negotiate, ally, destroy, cooperate, betray, and calculate. They produce peace as a conditional truce. They produce war as a logical continuation. They secrete official history as one secretes a useful memory.

Once this frame is admitted, many puzzles dissolve. Why public crimes go unpunished. Why victims receive apologies but no reparations. Why massacres become files. Why documented lies do not cause political collapse. The answer is simple. The sovereign scale is not subject to morality. It is subject to power relations and the patience of time.

Normative Consequences and the Point of No Return

If we want a truly civilized humanity, States must be held to a level of responsibility comparable to individuals. This means a judge above them, an independent enforcement force, a hierarchy of norms immune to the veto of the powerful, and an institutional shame that cannot be washed away with a press release. Without these elements, morality remains a set piece.

Saying this is not enough. We must acknowledge the obstacle. The very States that would have to submit to such a structure are precisely those that can prevent it. The necessary reform must be willed by those it would make vulnerable. This circularity makes the project nearly impossible and explains the persistence of moral prehistory at the sovereign level.

We can then choose between two positions. Deny the diagnosis and keep the liturgy, with its comforting illusions. Or accept it and abandon the fiction of an adult world. The second choice releases a painful lucidity. It strips international ceremonies of their power to deceive. It reveals a field of forces laid bare, without ornament.

A Conclusion Without Apparent Exit

As long as we treat States as entities above suspicion, as long as we speak of the international community without seeing the pack, as long as we mistake protocol for justice, we will remain the passive witnesses of a primitive world. True humanity will only exist when States are judged like human beings and punished like human beings. Until that becomes possible, the world will not be civilized. It never will be.

It is permissible to hope for an awakening. It is rational to note that it does not yet exist. Between the two lies our honesty. Either we consent to the fiction, or we admit that moral prehistory is not behind us. It is our present.