I regard the “State” or “Establishment” as the Emperor’s New Clothes. Everybody believes it has some essence, but it exists only in common belief. What is real are the people and relationships hiding behind a facade. I guess it’s sometimes used as a mechanism to regulate and/or dictate those relationships. (Don’t you love regulation…?)
It would be interesting to write up a case example of how this works, contrasting the human (mis)perception with human reality.
One example that comes to mind:
Someone gets fined for some senseless infraction (I was once fined for putting up a small advertisement on a street fixture in Geula, among hundreds of other advertisements put up without permits, which sheer bureaucracy would probably prevent me from getting anyways). The first reaction might be: What a stupid country! What has the stupid State done to me?!
But a more careful analysis would reveal it’s actually a human being, possibly arbitrarily, giving the ticket (in the name of “The State”); a person hired by another person, also working for “The State”, who was hired, voted in, or appointed, in turn, by another apparatchik of “The State” in order to enforce regulations passed by “The State”, which is to say, by a handful of people entrusted by “The State” to create such regulations, for the benefit of the residents of “The State” as they see it, and these “entrusted” individuals may have gotten this power very arbitrarily, through ignorant “mob rule”, political wheeling-dealing, etc… So where exactly is “The State” that has entrusted all these people with their responsibilities?!
Bottom line: A person, or group of people, have dictated a mechanism for regulating relationships (for example, democracy), and then imposed it on us all.
We might as well choose a pretense-less, God-imposed Davidic monarchy…