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How would a stateless society handle serious threats such as mass murder and terrorism?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Historically speaking, in most cases where the state has had loose control the "justice" enforced by populations hasn't been pretty. The idea of decentralized community enforcement is only able to be romanticized because it is distant, and it's distant because it fucking sucks. Lynchings, witch burnings, and especially feuds and unending cycles of retributive violence - although the places they have happened in were not stateless, they primarily happened in areas where state control was loose.
Feuds are the natural consequence of a lack of centralized authority. If a Hatfield goes out and kills someone, then the McCoy's deliver "decentralized community justice" by killing the murderer. Except the Hatfield's say their guy was innocent and the accusation was a pretext, the McCoy's are the real killers, so they go out and deliver "decentralized community justice" by killing a McCoy. And so on and so on for generations until everybody's forgotten what even started it.
The only thing that actually puts a stop to that is the big bad state coming in and saying, "Anytime anyone murders anyone, it is an offense against me. No more "settling the score," the score is settled now because I say it is, and if either of you keep this up you will be charged."
But it's not just the historical examples, which I'm sure "won't count" for whatever reason - the effect is also observable in game theory.
In the case of the "Iterated Prisoner's Delimma," the most effective strategy is "tit for tat," where defection is punished with defection and cooperation is rewarded with cooperation, which tends to result in cooperation with others following the same strategy. But what happens when we expand beyond two players?
For example, a game with a hundred players where everyone can put money in a pot, and the pot is doubled and then redistributed equally to everyone. In this case, it's impossible to do "tit for tat" because punishing defection with defection means defecting against everyone else, who would them try to punish you for defecting, and so on. In this case, the most effective strategy is to contribute nothing, and it's only a matter of time before everyone stops contributing.
This is a basic collective action problem, applicable to many irl situations, and the way to solve it is, again, to have a big bad centralized authority come in and tell everyone they have to contribute to the pot whether they like it or not. "The pot" could mean social services, infrastructure, common defense, etc.