Imagine the wilderness ecosystem.
Big predators eat the weak of grazing herbivores. Scavengers chew those bones. Hiding rodents gather seeds until snatched by hawks. Worms blissfully migrate through the mulch; shrubs burst from their excrement.
Consider the ecosystem of which humanity is a part.
Some people build towers. Others farm and sell their produce to lawyers who battle over the definition of justice so that soldiers will act in such and such a way. All this is to ensure that the organism that is the state will have regular bowel movements and breathe easily and be fed despite its own complex environment: other states. States guarding their burrows with claws. States gathering into herds and packs. States hearing music played by prophets that make them rabid or docile. States who sell their their voices for food like minstrels.
There are men like ants who build hives to dig for iron. Men like spiders to weave webs to catch wanderers. Men like beavers to dam rivers. Men like proteins that spin strands of chemicals into new strands of chemicals. Chemicals made into laws or played as music in the courts of lions or passed to new enzymes to form the membrane of a spore. Spores that launch into the breeze, latch onto a dead tree, and grow from that richness of decay into a pale crust of life, inert until harvested and cooked in a broth by a historian or a pharmaceutical company or an oil rig.
When we conceive of ourselves apart from all of this, no wonder we are so often disappointed. We are blessed to be part of a wondrous Nature.
