The most apt analogy for the relationship between the state and its subjects is to the farmer and a herd of livestock.

Once you internalize this, a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, and the relationships between them, become crystal clear.

Borders and immigration controls, concentration camps and genocide, national IDs and passports, conquest and forced migrations, taxes and conscription and corvée labor, slave labor and prison labor—it’s all just the state managing and harvesting from its herd.