In today’s modern world, surnames have essentially become normalized, and therefore most people don’t pay much attention to the reason or of the need for surnames to have been created in the first place – but perhaps they should. As might be mentioned, back in the day when humanity lived in significantly smaller enclaves, such as in villages, we find that those communities were small in number, signifying therefore that each resident of such a village, pretty much knew everybody else; of which, this also meant that people were identified by their given birthname, which would primarily just be their first name, though perhaps they also would be additionally labeled by others as being the son or daughter of so and so, or perhaps appended to their birthname would be their specific village, or of their profession. In other words, back in a day and age, in which the vast majority of people were familiar with one another, they were simply known by their birthname, and therefore it wasn’t necessary to have a formal last name, at all.
As time moved on, and life became ever more modernized, so that some of those villages morphed into towns, and then some of those towns became cities, this thus lead to the formation of formal governments to monitor the people so being governed, of which, those same governments had a great desire to know their people, via through a census and other things of that sort so as to thus properly tax their citizens, to identify those citizens, and also to utilize those citizens for the service of that country in times of war and the like. This thus meant, that some general form of identification was needed, that went beyond a mere first name, leading therefore to not only surnames being created and subsequently mandated by the state, but also the beginning of each citizen essentially becoming identified with not just a legal name, but also an address, as well as a formal identity card.
Basically, then, surnames are part and parcel, along with identity papers, of how the government is best able to monitor its people, and quite obviously, are of no real benefit to people that know each other by sight, and call each other by their respective first names. It must be said that with all of the thousands upon thousands of people living in cities, or hundreds of thousands in mega-cities, that no government would be able to properly administer to its citizens or to be of assistance to them, without reams and reams of documentation, containing formal first and last names, along with a specific system so setup to identify people by their own unique attributes, in regards to their birthdate, identification number, and a governmental approved picture associated with each citizen, so of.
Although by definition, each and every one of us is a unique individual, present day governments, make it a point to formalize such, and of which, this thus gives a significant amount of informational power to that government to then be of notable assistance to their population, or such can be abused in a fashion in which the people are oppressed or suffer even worse.