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Emile comments on Open thread, September 2-8, 2013 - Less Wrong
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If everyone agrees about how power is distributed fighting is unnecessary.
Fighting can be necessary when another person claims to have power that they actually don't have.
Surely it's in nearly everyone's interest to have more power distributed to themselves!
But fighting to get more power may have positive utility for oneself, it usually has negative utility for others, so it's in everybody's interest that everybody agrees to not fighting for more power. This agreement can take the form of alternative ways of getting power (elections, money), or making power less important to one's happiness (the rule of law).
If you don't have enough power to win a fight fighting is also negative utility for yourself. If everyone predicts that you would win a fight, you usually don't actually have to fight it to get what you want.
Fighting has a huge signalling component: when viewed in isolation, a fight might be trivially, obviously, a net negative for both participants. However, either or both! participants might in the future win more concessions for their willingness to fight alone than the loss of the fight. As humans are adaption executers, a certain willingness to fight, to seek revenge, etc. is pretty common. At least, this seems to be the dominant theory and sensible to me.