The state monopoly on violence

If you enter into a contract with the Mob and fail to deliver the goods, they will send a representative around to break your knees. If you enter into a contract with an organization following the rule of law in a place where rule of law obtains and fail to deliver the goods, they will attempt to recover the money first with polite and then threatening letters, and eventually they may take you to court, and if things go very wrong for you, you might possibly end up in jail where the guards might break your knees on some pretext. But probably you'll just get sent to collections and pay up eventually, or go through bankruptcy to discharge the debt. A normal law-abiding person doesn't need to threaten you with breaking your knees because you both know that you are held and threatened by the ever-present, if generally somewhat distant, power of the state. In a state with a working legal system, there are many steps between going astray and violence, but the violence is always there, available as a last, and legitimate, recourse.

That, in a nutshell, is the state monopoly on violence. It is a system by which, under pervasively looming but distant threat of legitimate state violence, individuals give up the right to break anyone's knees at the first sign of contract violation, and instead outsource it, and at the same time (usually) give each other a bit more time between the contract violation and the violence.

If the advantage of breathing room between violation and violence is not immediately obvious, consider the more common example, though not more the more common case, murder and revenge. In a situation where everyone freelances their own violence, when a person you care about is murdered, you have basically two choices: let it go or go murder the murderer yourself. After you do that, their friends and family will have the same choice. There's a chance you'll get into a multi-generational nightmare of revenge killings that continue long after the original inciting incident. Now you've got a blood feud. If instead you agree to give up personal violence and treat the murder as a crime not just as against an individual but against the state (a violation of the monopoly), the state takes on the stain of the revenge killing^[1] and you can have revenge without vendetta.

Even assuming these are the two choices, mob or prison, vendetta or the death penalty--and they are not, there are other ways we might organize society than by coercive force--it's a fragile thing to maintain. The power shifts. It's not that a state has the monopoly on legitimate violence. It's that when an entity establishes itself as being the legitimate wielder of violence, it becomes a state. That's what makes it a state^[2].

In his novel The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines that in the wakes of various horrific climate disasters and mass casualty events, some groups arise that hold violence^[3], even up to murder, is justified if it will prevent further global warming and mass death. They do it because the legitimate avenues of state power are taking too long. And because things got bad enough for long enough, most people look on and don't mind.

Gaia's Shock Troops, Children of Kali, Defenders of Mother Earth, Earth First, and so on. People read about their violent acts and the frequent resulting deaths, and shrugged. What did people expect? Who owned private jets anymore? [...] Fools conspicuously burning carbon, killed from out of the sky somehow? So what. [...] People were angry, people were scared. People were not fastidious.

In The Ministry for the Future the sabotage and assassinations are effective in limiting carbon burning, because no one wants to fly in jets any more, never mind be the CEO of an oil company. It's too dangerous. In the novel, many more people are working to save the earth and humanity through non-violent means than through violence. It's not a dystopian novel, nor a utopian one, either.

The public reaction to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson reminded me a bit of The Ministry for the Future. The way most people just don't care and instead recount the various ways the American health insurance industry has harmed them, and the way in which other health insurance companies seem to be taking notice seemed to echo the imaginary public reaction to eco-vigilantes.

Again, a quote from The Ministry for the Future:

The state monopoly on violence had probably been a good idea while it lasted, but no one could believe it would ever come back. Only in some better time.

I don't think the general lack of sympathy for the apparent assassination^[4] of a CEO of a particularly parasitic company is a sign that something is wrong with Americans' empathy. It's a sign of how bad the health insurance industry and as a result health care have become in the US, and how little faith people have that the supposedly legitimate avenues for redress will help them. The very systems of order and process and bureaucracy in general become instruments of murder when they delay lifesaving healthcare until someone dies. People feel that violence has been done to them and their loved ones, and they see no option for redress. The state monopoly on violence only works as long as the state holds up its end of the bargain. This week's reaction shows that it might be breaking down. If it does break down, I'd like to try for one of the non-coercive systems next, instead, one where the backing currency isn't the violence of the state, or any kind of violence.