The thing is that the violence-based perspective isn't "how things work". It's simply one way to explain how things work, and it's a wildly ineffective one with a bare minimum of explanatory power: enough, mostly, to set up a false dichotomy between "bad violent people, i.e. amoral men in black with guns" and "you, who are totally not a violent person but would be only if forced, right?"

I didn't say that the violence-based perspective is how things work, I said that it's important to understand how things work and the implication there in my mind was that the violence-based perspective is an important part of that. I thought it was just too obvious to mention that there are many lenses through which to see the world.

For me, the way to refute Assange's point that states depend on violence and are therefore bad is not to say no they don't, or that that's not a useful perspective, but rather, "Look at the wondrous things we can build using our ability to marshal force effectively."

When I first heard about this violence-based perspective, it threw into question the notions of society and in particular human rights that I had from my high school education, because as you say, we have this internalized notion that violence is bad.

But now that I understand that rights really are just agreements between people that are brought into existence by violence, it actually makes me glad to have this violence around, and I don't see it as a universally bad thing. Nevertheless, I would prefer a society in which there is as little violence as possible, but I'm not by any means convinced that the answer there is "less state".