Fortunately, that's merely a PMC myth. Graeber, _The Dawn of Everything_:

>It’s simply assumed, in this kind of theory, that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dunbar puts it, ‘chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to’; or as Jared Diamond says, ‘large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer thedecisions and laws.’115 In other words, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly of coercive force (again, the ability to threaten everyone with weapons) is ultimately required in order to do this. Writing systems, in turn, are almost invariably assumed to have developed in the service of impersonal bureaucratic states, which were the result of the whole process.

>Now, as we’ve already seen, none of this is really true, and predictions based on these assumptions almost invariably turn out to be wrong. We saw one dramatic example in Chapter Eight. It was once widely assumed that if bureaucratic states tend to arise in areas with complex irrigation systems, it must have been because of the need for administrators to co-ordinate the maintenance of canals and regulate the water supply. In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there’s little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters. Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite ‘egalitarian’, were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today. Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn’t care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.