Soap Jackal on Order

The original Soap Jackal left a comment worth reproducing in full:

The primary question is “How do we maintain order?”

The libertarians have terrible answers to this as most arguments are predicated on Anarcho Capitalism being enforced. You cant use utopian style arguments in order to propose anything that needs a pragmatic answer.

Most of these ‘libertarians have a confusion around :

Law Generation and Law Enforcement

and end up blaming men who have no control over the laws content because they enforced it.

We have a system of legislative law in which laws are produced ex nihlo and agents of the state are assigned to enforce these edicts. Thats the formal legal concept that the supreme court has enforced.

The assumption by those arguing against libertarian anti-cop rhetoric is that legislative law enforced by state agents is the only way to maintain order. I can see why you would want order but arguing that The State is responsible for applying Justice really seems like a terrible idea.

I notice that everyone seems to be arguing propositions as a result which drift quite far from pragmatic or realistic solutions.

Virtue. Order. Justice.

The anti-cop groups and the police/courts as an institution do very little to deal with these 3 concepts. They all want their own special brands of chaos.

The only answer I have to the cop debate is:

“There should be much more effort spent on helping moral men be able to commit acts of violence when it is Just and only when necessary. To not be afraid of the act but to have it in context with virtue and objective morality.”

Now a polycentric legal structure maintained by organized gangs and local power structures seems, historically, to be quite capable of doing this as long as the population can defend morality.

The benefit of this observation is that you don’t need a revolution to apply it. All you need is the counter-revolution of local groups of men banding together and protecting their communities and sustaining courts who are actually about Justice rather than ‘The Law’

Violence, Power, and Morality are the founts of politics. This debate can quickly escalate to the very heads of state and the power structures of the whole planet. Do not fall into the trap of planning the global counter revolution. Just try to figure out how to make orderly communities anti-fragile.

What generates the law? Who enforces the law? How is it enforced? Who writes the law? How can we ensure that the laws are just? How can we encourage people to obey just laws? Should the agents of the state be the only people obligated and to enforce the law?

These are difficult, unsettled questions that tend to be ignored. How do you ensure that the people are predisposed towards good behavior? The contemporary crisis seems to be around the failure of the notion that laws can themselves generate order, and that endless new laws can be written and enforced, in a tyrannical fashion.