Ah, yes. A voice of reason. It gets so tiresome when some people can't understand that the use of force is unavoidable. People who frequent the same circles where game theory is routinely discussed don't seem to grasp violence being a necessary consequence of its benefits to the victor. If they had understood that, then they would immediately have understood that a democratic government is a pretty good overlord to have, and that having some sort of overlord is mandatory. While it is true that states and mafia are similar in some respects, that is a truth of dubious interest and importance.

I can only conclude that the people continuing to compare mafia and democratic governments are ideologically handicapped. Or maybe it's a steady procession of innocents believing the world has never considered their insight. Probably a bit of both.

The idea that centralized violence is necessary for a "functioning" society is a common misconception. It's rarely discussed in political circles but we've got to remember that the state as we understand it is a technology, not some divinely ordered system. And as HNers should well know, something new can always come along and obsolete the old.

There are a number[1] of anthropological investigations into this (outside the scope of anarchist theory to which this tenant is integral) although they're fairly diffuse.

This is similar to the idea that a a voting majority is the only reasonable way to make egalitarian decisions. As anarchist[2] and non-heirarchical organizations (whether we're talking Kobanê or Valve) are illustrating, governing by consensus is a rarely discussed but viable alternative.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=society%20without%20ch... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities

Are there any proposed systems in which a billion person society can function without centralized violence?

There are many such proposed systems. A better question is if there are any such proposed systems that aren't silly and predicated an a refusal to understand human nature.

I know a number of communists and anarchists who seem to believe they can just wish away aspects of primate psychology.

I can believe a small group can exist as a collective without violence for a while (maybe a long while), but how can any such group deal with a member that decides to use violence to get their way? Either that person becomes leader, the group organises to stop them with violence or the group dissolves.

And I don't think even such a temporary arrangement can scale much above Dunbar's number.

Not to mention those who advocate for free-market capitalism as a panacea, but don't acknowledge that violence is logical conclusion of the exploitation of a market without any regulation.

That or they believe the Roman model of private armies vying for control of a state was a great idea.

This is a completely incorrect characterisation of the current state of free-market anarchist thinking. Please see Michael Huemer's "The Problem of Political Authority" for an actual discussion of the moral/ethical problems with governments, and a proposal for free-market anarchy.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Autho...

Can you provide a link to a good overview of his arguments? I'm interested but the wikipedia page is all about critical reception.

Here is a link to the first bit of the book.[1] His arguments are tough to sum up, becasue he responds to each justification for the authority of the state, and describes many details. The second link is something approaching a summary.[2]

[1] http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/Contents.pdf

[2] http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/03/04/michael-huemer/proble...

>In the second half of The Problem of Political Authority, I consider how an anarchist society might work, specifically, an “anarcho-capitalist” society. In this society, the services now provided by governmental police would instead be provided by competing protection agencies, hired either by individuals or by associations of property owners. Protection agencies, knowing that violence is the most expensive way of resolving disputes, would require their customers to seek peaceful resolutions of any disputes with other individuals. Agencies would decline to protect those who either willfully initiated conflicts with others or refused to seek peaceful resolutions; any agencies that acted otherwise would find themselves unable to compete in the marketplace due to the soaring costs created by their troublesome clients. The services presently provided by government courts would instead be provided by private arbitrators, hired by individuals who had disputes with one another. Laws, rather than being made by a legislature, would be made by the arbitrators

So we'll have "protection agencies" who have military arms and logistics arms to manage the necessary affairs of the agency. Those agencies will somehow provide equipment to their military, or else they'll be inferior to the other agencies, meaning they will not be giving protection free of charge, instead they will run capitalist markets within their domain and somehow extract a profit (either by taxing transactions, or charging individuals). How exactly is that different from the current nation-state paradigm?

Please read the book if you would like a complete explanation of Huemer's ideas. In short, the protection agencies he describes as one alternative to the current coercive state is as follows: There can be a large number of different-sized protective agencies which operate under contract with either neighborhood associations, or individual landowners (depending on size and preferences). Some may be large, while others will be small; there is no reason to believe economies of scale exist for protective agencies as they do for car companies. It is unlikely that the agencies will fight with one another, as they have strong disincentives (on multiple levels) to do so. It is most likely that they would operate under subscription contracts, and the market for protection will likely be a lively and competitive one.

Huemer's anarchy is very different from the current state; it is not 'the same with one or two changes'.

> there is no reason to believe economies of scale exist for protective agencies

Seriously? There is a huge advantage to being the biggest, baddest agency. If you're substantially larger than the competition you just go to them and say "hi there, give me all your stuff or we kill all of you and your clients".

> It is unlikely that the agencies will fight with one another, as they have strong disincentives

You're completely leaving out the incredibly strong incentive of "Give me your stuff or I kill you". It's infinite profit!

There are two ways history has proven to prevent "Hobbesian War" as he calls it: One incredibly powerful military hegemony, or a delicate balance of multiple exactly equally powerful military hegemonies. Anytime neither of those exist in an area, you get war because it's a lot easier to take someone else's stuff than it is to make your own. To think otherwise is hilariously naiive.

I will not be able to address your arguments one-by-one without rewriting chapters of Huemer's book. I would recommend that you or anyone else interested in these points read the book and/or the numerous discussions he has had online with other academics.

It will be very difficult for you to come up with off-the-cuff arguments which will best a book written by an experienced philosopher over more than a year, and you are unlikely to win over anyone who agrees with Huemer in this forum for exactly that reason. If you wish to discredit him, I suggest you find an academic who has written a thoughtful critique of "The Problem of Political Authority", or that you write a book or paper on its flaws. Anything short of that is most likely to be self-satisfying but ineffective rhetoric.

The problem is that there's no guarantee that the protection agencies will all operate from anarcho-capitalist premises. All you need is one anarcho-socialist protection agency that protects property rights based on need rather than on dibs, and you have unavoidable internal violence.

Huemer addresses this sort of issue. If by "protects property rights based on need" you mean 'takes things other people possess', that protection agency could have a conflict with others. This sort of situation may occur, but is relatively unlikely given the high costs associated with such conflicts, and a number of other factors described by Huemer.

If my characterization is incorrect, please describe a viewpoint-neutral algorithm capable of determining whether the anarcho-socialist group has a claim to the goods they do not possess. If no such algorithm exists, the socialist protection agency is indistinguishable from a group of theives.

It should also be noted that Huemer explicitly states that socialist groups would likely exist in the anarchy he describes. They would, however, not be able to coerce non-members.

> If by "protects property rights based on need" you mean 'takes things other people possess', that protection agency could have a conflict with others.

Do you have any idea just how much property in a capitalist economy is possessed by someone other than the owner? What happens if I'm renting a house from you and you try to evict me? Now it's your protection agency--not mine--trying to take something that other people possess.

In fact, capitalist economies also have shades of legal ownership, i.e. lienholding--so I might even be the legal owner of a Camaro, but if I don't pay the car payment the repo man is legally entitled to take something I not only possess, but actually have some legal title to! And this only works because there's an unambiguous and authoritative legal framework in which these kinds of actions are permissible within bounds of regulation. OK, so if your anarcho-capitalist protection agency tries to repossess my Camaro and my anarcho-capitalist protection agency doesn't think your protection agency followed enough due process, where do we go from there?

The entire point of having a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force is that these kinds of disputes are inevitably going to come up, competing sides are going to be unable to come to a settled agreement, and in the absence of a state, these disagreements will escalate to violence. This isn't a theory, it's the observed history of humanity.

My point was intended to look at the relationship between force and propaganda. I think the effective use of propaganda is a function of the size and power of an organization. Thus, organizations that achieve greater power are more effective at creating an image of legitimacy.

If a government utilizes extensive propaganda against its citizens, can it really be called a democratic government? I'd argue that it cannot.

Your points are interesting but I think that saying government=organisation=mafia ignores the larger differences.

Large organisations might have better propaganda but the nature of the organisation might be a bigger factor in the equation.

> a single group having the monopoly on violence

There is some truth to this from a top-down, social organization perspective.

But governments don't just have a monopoly on violence, they actively use propaganda to hide the use of violence from the public, through an ongoing process of whitewashing and image management that is incompatible with democracy.

Violence is ugly. If our government does it, it ought to own up to every gory detail so that the public can honestly assess its appetite for more.

Except part of the point of a democratic society is to leave the hard decisions of state to a small group of people who are ideally best equipped to handle it. The intent is precisely for the public at large to NOT have to assess every minute, gory detail, as then they would have no time left to contribute to the society.

Now, that model also relies on the ability to trust that those chosen to make the hard decisions are doing so competently and in the best interests of the society at large. It also bakes in the assumption that everyone will have to make compromises.

In the immortal words of Calvin and Hobbes "A good compromise leaves everyone mad".

> Except part of the point of a democratic society is to leave the hard decisions of state to a small group of people who are ideally best equipped to handle it.

No, that's the point of representative government (which can be part of democratic society -- hence, representative democracy -- but is not essential to it.)

The point of democratic society is that society -- and government in particular -- should be responsive to the will of the people. One of the things the people frequently want, however, is not to spend all of their time dealing with issues of governance, so they often choose representative democracy as a mechanism for achieving that goal.

>> Except part of the point of a democratic society is to leave the hard decisions of state to a small group of people who are ideally best equipped to handle it.

In a representative democracy like America yes, (a democratic republic actually) yet a pure democracy seeks majority compromise.

True. I was using democratic as shorthand for democratic republic, but that does lose a bit of clarity.

Representative democracy is not worthwhile for its own sake, it is something that is earned. The basic idea of democracy has no room for an intermediate "council of elders".

Nothing is worthwhile for its own sake, but empirically speaking representative democratic societies have been the most successful in recent history, which makes it a reasonable default. What would you argue is better and more importantly, what evidence do you have that it would be more effective?

>Except part of the point of a democratic society is to leave the hard decisions of state to a small group of people who are ideally best equipped to handle it.

Actually that's not "part of the point" at all. The point of a democratic society is to elect representatives to act on the majority's will, not to take "decisions on your behalf" and not because they are "ideally best equipped to handle it".

I think you greatly overestimate the state's interest in hiding the violence they perpetrate, and underestimate how little people care about their country using violence, at least in this country and many eastern ones.

In revolutionary France, as part of the purge of the old monarchy and replacement with a republic, there was a need for a more efficient way of killing people. See, the people wanted to kill all the old royals, but the old method was hanging, drawing and quartering, which besides being labor-intensive and incredibly painful, often used a stand-in in place of a rich nobleman. They wanted something more humane, more egalitarian, and of course, more efficient, since they had a lot of people to kill. The guillotine was introduced, and from Wikipedia:

"Its operation became a popular entertainment that attracted great crowds of spectators. Vendors sold programs listing the names of those scheduled to die. Many people came day after day and vied for the best locations from which to observe the proceedings; knitting women (tricoteuses) formed a cadre of hardcore regulars, inciting the crowd. Parents often brought their children. By the end of the Terror, the crowds had thinned drastically. Repetition had staled even this most grisly of entertainments, and audiences grew bored."

During both the Russian and Chinese revolutions, death tolls of those executed as traitors or proponents of the old empire were published widely by the state. After World War II, traitors were again executed in great numbers, and even during the war a "blocking detachment" might stay behind the lines to execute any deserters.

America has also had public execution pretty much since day one. Hanging was our preferred method before the electric chair, and then lethal injection. We make sure that both the families of the victims can witness these deaths, as well as other witnesses, and they're widely covered in the news media. We are still the only Western nation left that practices capital punishment, mainly because people here love it so much that they can't seem to pass a law banning it or follow the UN resolutions that ban it.

Now, there's plenty of abuse doled out by oppressive regimes against their people. But this abuse is still not necessarily propagandized or even hidden. A state may use secrecy and intimidation to continue their abuse, but propaganda is used more often to bolster some case the state is trying to make. Anyway, in modern times it's far more common for corporations to use propaganda to defend themselves from democracy than for the state to use it against its people.

>America has also had public execution pretty much since day one. Hanging was our preferred method before the electric chair, and then lethal injection. We make sure that both the families of the victims can witness these deaths, as well as other witnesses, and they're widely covered in the news media. We are still the only Western nation left that practices capital punishment, mainly because people here love it so much that they can't seem to pass a law banning it or follow the UN resolutions that ban it.

Let's make this abundantly clear: the United States of America categorically does not execute criminals because "people here love it so much." Nothing about that idea is even slightly correct. Capital punishment is not used at all in several of the states, and in the ones where it's a valid sentence (or on the federal level,) your likelihood of ever actually being executed is excessively low. Since 1950, the Federal government executed 26 people. The entire country executed 35 people over the whole of 2014. Those 35 were in just five states. What a truly bloodthirsty culture.

As for executions being "public," there haven't been any of those since 1936. There is certainly room to argue that subsequent events stretched the definition of the word "private," but the day has long since passed where you could just show up at the town square on the scheduled day in your commemorative "I <3 watching people die" hoodie and watch the Man give someone the needle. The reason witnesses are present to view modern "private" executions is because having the government kill convicted criminals where nobody is allowed to see it happen is an absolutely terrible idea that defies common sense. Like, duh.

If Americans love watching their public executions so much, why do they never get around to actually doing it, and why aren't citizens allowed to just show up and take pictures?

Ahh. Found the realist in this thread. Leviathan isn't really taken too seriously these days in political philosophy although its taught extensively because its a great introduction and his influence is wide. Hobbes bases his argument on premises that are dubious at best. (Men and women being solitary, miserably brutal existence until society gave them order) His conclusions are also extreme in that he concludes we will enter into the social contract and resign any semblance of freedom other than our right to preserve our own lives at any cost. He also goes to extreme lengths to justify his premises and conclusions based on the bible which is interesting if not a very modern approach to political philosophy. Max Weber is an interesting read if you want something a little more modern. John Simmons is another one to check out.

  Having only one source of violent coercion is
  vital for a society to function properly

Is it a problem if the sources don't share jurisdiction, or don't disagree in areas of shared jurisdiction?

I mean, is it a problem if the French and German governments disagree, or if boxers hit each other, or if America decides to use drones to bomb some terrorist training camps in Pakistan, or if the tax authorities pursue offences the drug authorities are indifferent towards?