Replying to Avatar Laeserin

Yes, of course. Violence is very easy, but so destructive and prone to retaliation in kind, that it carries a high cost, so people usually avoid it.

It's "cheaper" for a group of individuals to avoid violence or arrange their environment (including society) to reduce the temptation to resort to violence. Agreeing to have conflicts presided over by a mediator, for instance, or having a standardized culture of restitution for wrongs. Religion or culture can also play into limiting violence, by blessing the peacemakers and awarding those who prevent or refuse to engage in violence a higher status. Violence can also be reduced by raising the cost further, through feuds (making one person's act of violence a problem more people have to suffer from, so that the violent person is discouraged from violence by his peers/relations).

Peace, in other words, can pay dividends.
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Jacob Drafts 1y ago

Yes and those systems are kept honest by the knowledge that if they stop being honest Clan A might very well decide to burn it all down if you push them far enough. Sure they might lose but that sort of fight is likely a Pyrrhic victory when you don’t have a large outside force coming in to spread the costs out or wipe out Clan A before they can kill enough members of the other clans to make it a Pyrrhic victory. Leaving aside of course that most of the clans are probably interrelated at some level if they have been in the area any length of time.

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Jacob Drafts 1y ago

That would also be where duels come in. Sometimes people just have to have it out. Doing so in a culturally proscribed and accepted manner lets the kin of both parties accept what was done. There might be hard feelings but a feud? Probably not. There likely would be over a lynching or back-shooting.