For these purposes, all we need is to get rid of (or at the very least properly control) violent tendencies. We don’t need to make it so everyone’s singing religious rock songs around a fake camp fire to celebrate everyone getting a participation medal in cooperative soccer.

My bosses have never needed violence to enforce their opinions, and I have never needed to resort to violence against them when working relationships have turned sour.

And ridding the action is all that is necessary for us to not die from civil disorder in a space settlement.

This is only because the (threat of) violence has been outsourced to the state. Imagine that there is no state monopoly on violence [1] and your boss pays you directly in food, which you need to survive. Suddenly he refuses to pay you and you face starvation. Now you’re pretty likely to resort to violence.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

I’ve mostly avoided needing to involve the state, too. My personality is more of “compete by being better” and I regard violence (and regulatory capture) as cheating.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an anarchist — I agree that state monopoly on violence would be spontaneously recreated if it was removed. I’m also a lot more dubious about the political future than about the technological future.

But, that’s beside the point: I’m saying that we could, plausibly, have social and political structures that suppress our violent tendencies and in so doing make it not ridiculously unsafe to live in a fragile space habitat.

This is not without precedent, as we are less violent now than we were a mere few hundred years ago, and have managed this with little in the way of actual evolution.