Also, the people give the government exemption from moral rules. The government can lie, steal, murder, and do much more, with the support of the majority of people.
Discussion
This sounds very right.
Society is built on the margins - there’s always only a handful of people, or companies with people, that are pushing the boundaries of innovation to make the world a better place. The rest of the plebs are pure maintenance.
Our moral norms in part allow us to practically build societies that scale and give space for the people in the margins to do their thing and advance society.
It is quite possible alternative societies existed but naturally got outcompeted by our current ones because our moral values allowed us to scale to greater sizes and push innovation faster, better, harder and stronger.
Society to a large extent is about scaling trust between people. Decentralized law like religion and centralized law like constitutions and the justice system are tools that have proven useful to build powerful societies