In the state of nature, if someone does you wrong, it’s up to you and your mates to deal with it. This often means violence.
For most of English history there was no police force. Republican Rome had no police. There was law, but it was often privately enforced and often families and friends would take vengeance for wrongs. This led to rather a lot of violence and death, as well as feuds, where violence would continue long beyond the original offense.
Private justice; private vengeance thus comes with huge downsides, so in many societies we give up our right to use violence to right wrongs. We give that right to government in some form, and we reap the benefits of safety and that, in principle, stronger groups can’t bully those who are too weak to obtain their own justice.
The benefits are huge and everyone with sense recognizes that going back to private justice, to saying “they did me or mine wrong, I should beat or kill them” will mean a huge loss of public safety.
But whenever there’s a situation where changing from the status quo entails a huge cost there will be those who say “in that margin, I can benefit. All I have to do is take just a little less than the cost of change.”
How many people does private insurance and denials of care kill? It’s certainly, at least, in the tens of thousands.
What happens is simple enough. Some people, rich and powerful, get the right to harm others for money: the government doesn’t go after them for killing or hurting people. This is true of private equity buying companies, larding them up with debt then running them into bankruptcy so that many of their employees wind up impoverishing and homeless, for example. It was true of bankers causing a financial crisis. It is true of pharma jacking up prices or bosses stealing employees wages and water companies in the UK dumping sewage into the river and giving the money intended to clean sewage to their executives and investors.
None of this is punished by the law, yet people suffer.
But the cost of going back to private justice is HIGH and the transition cost, where the police and courts will charge those who enforce private justice with crimes, while not charging those who kill thousands with crimes, is awful.
So the bet by those who commit what has come to be called “social murder” is that they can get away with it: the cost of private justice is too high.
Still, there’s always the temptation to take a little more, then a little more and then a little more. To think, “well, I’m so rich I can have bodyguards and travel by helicopter and private jet and armored limo. The peons can’t get to me.”
But slowly (then all at once) ordinary people realize it’s not a good deal for them. Americans come to realize that Putin and Xi aren’t their real enemies, because their real enemies are those who are actually going to kill them or make them homeless, and those people are the rich and powerful in their own country.
Elon Musk, right now, is trying to cut Social Security and Medicare. If he succeeds a lot of people will wind up in pain, homeless or dead who wouldn’t have otherwise. He’s a direct threat to many, many people.
Putin isn’t going to make you homeless or kill you or deny you health care.
And when this switch flips, well, perhaps people decide that the high cost of going back to private justice is worth it and that when they gave up their right to private justice, they gave up their power. It was a good deal, as long as they could keep control of government and use government to control the wealthy and powerful, but once government control was lost, well, the power they gave up was used against them.
And this is, maybe, where we are. If more and more executives, CEOs and politicians wind up targets of extra-judicial justice, we’ll know it’s happened.
This isn’t, of course, an endorsement. It’s analysis. It’s in no one’s interest for the situation to become so awful that ending the state monopoly on violent justice makes cold hard rational sense for millions of people.
But that appears to be where we’re heading, if we aren’t there already.
Madame Blatvatsky
It’s a very interesting topic. I think that notwithstanding the downside of increased general violence, if there was a more even distribution of it, it might be worth the sacrifice. Or is that just punching oneself in the nose to spite face?
The lionising of a certain vigilante might lead to interesting outcomes, I guess.
bruce wilder
Yes.
Revelo
USA (and Canada and EU) are very far from a situation of peasant revolt. Peasant revolt requires starvation or other imminent catastrophe that makes it more worthwhile to risk death than accept suffering. Lack of health care is certainly not an imminent catastrophe for majority of able-bodied (hence able to revolt) population anywhere. How much healthcare currently for poor people in Phillipines, Bangladesh or Africa?
Furthermore, peasant revolts are only successful if security forces are on their side, meaning starvation or other imminent catastrophe has to be universal. Otherwise, revolt is brutally repressed. If peasants are mostly useless eaters whose death will not impact societal functioning, and that is true for most people nowadays due to mechanization to speak nothing of coming wave of AI/robotics automation, then the brutality will be machine gunning from helicopters or gassing.
More likely is gradual decay of society combined with increasingly repressive police state. Each terrorist incident will result in more surveillance and more spending on security apparatus. Everyone will eventually have to carry an electronic device that reports their location at all times, with strict penalties for disobedience. Bloggers who discuss revolt will be monitored thereafter, maybe warned by police, maybe taken away to prison without warning or trial (England is almost at this point, Canada trailing, USA the laggard due to its greater tolerance for violence and chaos). Security forces will eventually comprise huge proportion of work force, at which point low level security forces will begin to sabotage the system because they are also victims. Managers will collude in sabotage as part of bureaucratic in fighting with other managers.
Once system is sufficiently rotten, starvation or other imminent catastrophe mentioned above will appear, due to some random set of circumstances, probably including natural disaster or military/terrorist attack by other government hungry for natural resources. That’s when successful peasant revolt occurs, because security forces will be on board with the revolt.
Duncan Kinder
So you want to reduce Zoro to a math problem?
Oakchair
There are two questions. How far can the ruling class go before there is a revolt? Can said revolt succeed or will it be stomped to blood and bones?
The ruling class has already inflicted 3% of children with Autism and half the population with a chronic illness, addicted the country to opioids, engaged in trillions of dollars in forever wars, engaged in mass censorship of dissenters, caused mass homelessness, and forced people to take a product that –literally according to the manufacturer– increased their chance of dying, being hospitalized and becoming ill. What else could they do that ignites a revolt?
As to the second question it looks like by the time it occurs –if it ever does– the masses will be too ill, addicted and impaired to do much but set fire to the ashes of society.
Andre
There is one thought that keeps coming back to me when I hear news about Luigi Mabglione. Is this not like Israel knocking off the top person in the many ways they’ve done it, Hamas, Hesbollah, etc? I don’t know how that relates to what is being expressed here, but it reminds me of the Obama days with his extra-judicial assassinations and their relationship (in my mind) to all the (what seemed to be) ‘extra-judicial cop killings at that time. I have a hard time wrapping my head around ‘public and private’ violence as you describe it here. What would a lynching be, in the old days???
Ian Welsh
Lynching is private violence. There’s a reason why no one really wants to go back to private violence and why elites have been able to get away with so much.
mago
The olds hit hardest by a fractured social service network lack the oomph to fight back, but their strapped offspring lacking resources to support mom and pop might find the collective outrage to drone the overclass.
Hope I live to see it happen.
sbt42
For those who have a bit of confusion as to the difference between vigilantism and state violence/state control, you may want to have a look at an old Clint Eastwood film called “Hang ’em High.” Eastwood’s character is falsely accused of cattle theft by a posse of local ranchers. They string him up on a tree and leave him for dead. Eastwood is rescued while at death’s door, is appointed as sheriff of the town, and brings the posse members to justice or runs them off, endorsed by social law. The townspeople appreciate him and his efforts.
There’s a scattershot monologue by the local judge/Justice of the Peace at the end of the film, and that kind of derails things in my opinion. However this doesn’t take away from the film’s effective illustration of the difference between private and public violence.
different clue
@Andre,
The United HealthCare CEO was not a top person. He was a very well paid head butler. The top persons are the million-shares-apiece owners who keep themselves well hidden and well protected. They maintain a very deep bench of wannabe head butler replacements.
If so many head butlers are getting killed that the surviving head butlers and all the head butler wannabes decide they are safer in joining the lower orders to help pull the top persons down, they might lead a sort of palace revolt against the top persons.
But whoever up above said that mass revolt won’t happen till mass starvation gives the masses a binary choice between peaceful death by mass starvation or violent death by mass revolt . . . because violent death by mass revolt gives the starving masses a chance to kill some of the starvation engineers along with themselves.
I think that to avoid facing the masses with no way out of facing that binary choice, the Classes will continue their slow-rolling Long Stealth Killoff as long as they can keep it going and make it look like a series of unfortunate accidents and bad luck.
For example, the Classes are doing everything they can to keep the current H5N1 flue epidemic going among birds and cattle because they hope it will evolve into a megadeath human-to-human variant which will do a little more killing-off.
Feral Finster
The literal meaning of the term “outlaw” was someone that the king’s law did not protect, and, thus, anyone could harm an outlaw and without legal consequence.
Anonymous
A state which wants to maintain its monopoly on violence must also maintain its legitimacy. That means it must seem just in the eyes of the majority of citizens, who trust in its judicious use of legitimate violence in order to keep the majority of citizens safe and able to maintain their quality of life.
The collective shrug given to Brian Thompson’s assassination is proof positive our state has not maintained its legitimacy. It is clear to all that our institutions have become predatory and the state neither keeps the majority of citizens safe nor is willing to take action in order to maintain our quality of life. The ruling elite has freaked out of the assassination, handing out terrorism charges and a massive media campaign of collective finger wagging, because they have realized their years long pro-looter marketing campaign hasn’t fool anyone.
It’s quite obvious our (US) health insurance system is killing people, and also quite obvious it will “never ever ever” change (in the infamous words of Hillary Clinton) via ordinary legislative action. There is a simple logic to such a scenario, blood will have to be spilled in order for things to get better.
Yes, it must be terrifying for those whose wealthy lifestyle is dependent on the state of our healthcare system (or lack thereof). And yes, I don’t want to live in a society of legitimate “private violence,” as you put it, but I prefer it to institutional bureaucratic violence which is more deadly by far. Either we are slowly ground to dust in the machine built on top of us for exactly that purpose, or we do what it takes to stop it.
As JFK said, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Enough said.
Purple Library Guy
People are talking about peasant’s revolts, but that isn’t really what Mr. Welsh is talking about. It could eventually lead to such, but not necessarily. Revolts are organized, social affairs, and our society is good at keeping people atomized. The point rather is that people are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the public justice system mainly delivers injustice. It is losing legitimacy by its failure to bring important categories of evildoers to justice or even admit they should be, as well as by its tendency to largely ignore innocence among the lower orders (Like the plea bargain system and e.g. that judge that took bribes from private prisons to send people to jail, and who knows how many more weren’t caught?). At a certain point that system loses so much legitimacy that people no longer rely on it either to take action or as the source of definition of who counts as a criminal. And so people at an individual level begin to take those actions and definitions into their own hands. This is a sign of a kind of breakdown, but not necessarily a sign that most people’s lives overall are bad enough to want a revolution, let alone a sign that they’re going to be able to organize sufficiently to make one. The justice system after all is not the only system operating in a country.
Incidentally, if something revolutiony happens in North America it won’t be a peasant’s revolt, it will mostly be a French Revolution style citoyens’ revolt. Modern warfare technology makes rural revolutionaries easier to kill than urban ones, particularly in a developed country where the population density in the countryside is quite sparse because most people live in the cities. This is magnified in a revolutionary situation as opposed to an invasion/occupation of a foreign country. US authorities are going to be far more reluctant to carpet-bomb New York than Baghdad, but they’ll be FINE with obliterating some rural militia compound from the map.
In reality though I don’t think there’s going to be an effective revolution in the United States. Rather, what will happen is that the US will become more and more dysfunctional, its international reach will shrink and violence will become more and more endemic at home, maybe even turning into limited civil war between factions which all suck and fundamentally stand for different subsets of the putrid status quo.
But as the US becomes less and less able to interfere with other countries, more enlightened politics will emerge in various places–if I had to guess, I would imagine particularly in Latin America. And of course China will be powerful and culturally influential. Eventually, the US will find international influence going the other way from what they are used to–Americans will be consuming media from more prosperous advanced countries abroad, and eventually adopting their political and social ideas. And that is what may finally lead to reform.
Feral Finster
“The collective shrug given to Brian Thompson’s assassination is proof positive our state has not maintained its legitimacy. It is clear to all that our institutions have become predatory and the state neither keeps the majority of citizens safe nor is willing to take action in order to maintain our quality of life.”
Of course. I have long maintained that the United States is well on the becoming an overgrown Brazil, albeit a Brazil with worse weather, less attractive females, and a more hyperbelligerent foriegn policy.
Fewer mosquitos, so there is that.
You may find the linked article to be most instructive.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/the-brazilianization-of-the-world/
different clue
@Feral Finster,
. . . ” Fewer mosquitos, so there is that.” . . .
Only for a while. The more global warming advances, the more mosquitos America will have.
And also nasty ticks. Nasty ticks spreading everywhere with their icky tick diseases.
hickory
How do you know how people live in a ‘state of nature’? Have you studied such groups to learn how they resolve conflicts and hold people accountable for inappropriate behavior?
It turns out humans have a lot more ways to resolve disputes and conflicts than endless violence. But it takes actually investigating to learn about them. Historical England and Rome were cultures where a few people ruled over everyone else, so of course it was extremely difficult to resolve conflicts in a satisfying way. If you want to study the ‘state of nature’, go look at how people live in healthy cultures that maintain a baseline of respect as a normal way of life. These are explored in detail in my book One Disease One Cure at 1disease-1cure.com/
A few thousand years ago, every human alive lived in a healthy culture that maintained respectful relations internally as a normal way of life. Some people still live like that today, and I know because I’ve spent time with one such group in South America. Many humans lived in healthy societies up until the past 1-2 centuries. If you want to know how how humans can live in a good way, I encourage you to study how people live in societies without rulers. And these are not just small bands; many are nations or confederacies that do or did span thousands of square miles and had sizable populations and military capability.
Most people have only ever heard of societies with rulers (authoritarian democracies, monarchies, religious dictatorships, empires, you name it) because abusive rulers don’t want people to know it’s possible to live without rulers. For millennia, authorities have also encouraged all kinds of assumptions about how people live in a ‘state of nature’ (ie in societies without rulers, where people live respectfully together) so people won’t be tempted to run away or question the rulers’ legitimacy. The free book One Disease One Cure documents the millennia of propaganda that Christians, Muslims, and other have used to trick their conquered people so they wouldn’t recognize free societies for what they are – nations without rulers, where people maintain a baseline of mutual respect among everyone and deep solidarity as a normal way of life. And they have many ways of resolving and preventing conflict that will warm your heart, I promise.