Review
For real world examples of law enforcement without government police you might want to look at my book Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. A late draft is webbed:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm
Well damn, I really appreciate the comment. Your books have been such an inspiration to me but I still haven't read Legal Systems Very Different from Ours yet. It's been a while since I've looked into non-government law enforcement and the essay above wasn't intended to be a comprehensive primer on the topic; rather it was focused on my own trajectory and how I changed my mind on a relatively narrow slice. Thanks again for the link, and for everything you do!
It is a very well written, insightful book. Most of the chapters can stand alone. For what it is worth, I think it is David's best book.
I’m someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM’s policy proposals
BLM's policy proposals have changed since you wrote that. Currently, they're at https://impact.blacklivesmatter.com/policy/. They are:
(emphasis added)
Keep clicking on "Next Pillar" at the top right of the page; eventually they get around to bragging about how they've countered Amazon's attempts to keep a union from forming.
I'm not really a libertarian any more, but is this close enough to your beliefs that you still think the organization is worth supporting? Or have you considered voicing support for some other organization that has enough cachet in your social circle to ensure that you don't spend weekend nights alone?
I was not aware of this shift at all, so thank you for the update. BLM started out as a slogan that sort of coalesced into a central organization, but it still has to wrangle with various competing local or independent chapters (I distinctly recall groups within the same area accusing each other of being a scam). So I don't think it ever made sense to say "I support BLM's policy positions" unless you were very specific. My praise was limited to Campaign Zero's specific positions and that remains the case, but I should probably add more detail going forward.
It's really difficult to find effective organizations that don't experience this kind of mission drift. For example I used to work for the ACLU and used to be proud of my affiliation, but I barely recognize the org anymore.
It's really difficult to find effective organizations that don't experience this kind of mission drift. For example I used to work for the ACLU and used to be proud of my affiliation, but I barely recognize the org anymore.
This is a real, and mostly unspoken, possibility.
Perhaps circa 2023 ACLU already is the nicest and most competent possible organization of its kind in the environment of 2023, within the confines of available technology and resources, with reasonable prospects of doing something vaguely similar to its mission, and not disintegrating meanwhile.
Perhaps circa 2023 United States already is the nicest possible human society of roughly 330 million, within the confines of available technology, resources, and geography, with reasonable prospects of keeping them all alive and not disintegrating meanwhile .
Perhaps circa 2023 China/India already is the nicest possible human society of roughly 1.4 billion, within the confines of available technology, resources, and geography, with reasonable prospects of keeping them all alive and not disintegrating meanwhile.
Is there a reason to believe this is likely? Outside of a strong optimization pressure for niceness (of which there is definitely some, but relative to other optimization pressures it's relatively weak) I'd expect these organizations to be of roughly average possible niceness for their situation.
I mean, "This is the best of all possible X" is by definition a fairly conservative position. Anyone who's a progressive must be because they believe there generally are margins for improvement.
Just my opinions.
How an anarchist society can work without police. To me the example of Makhno's movement shows that it can work if most people are armed and willing to keep order, without delegating that task to anyone. (In this case they were armed because they were coming out of a world war.) Once people start saying "eh, I'm peaceful, I'll delegate the task of keeping order to someone else", you eventually end up with police.
Is police inherently bad. I think no, it depends mostly on what kind of laws it's enforcing and how fairly. Traffic laws, alright. Drug laws, worse. Laws against political dissent, oh no. So it makes more sense to focus on improving the laws and courts.
Prisons. I think prisons should be abolished, because keeping someone locked up is a long psychological torture. The best alternative is probably exile to designated "penal" territories (but without forced labor). Either overseas, or designated territories within the country itself.
Exile can either be administered by the state, in which case it's an open air prison, or by emergent criminal gangs. Forced labor emerges either way I think.
Even under the idealistic assumption that the exile-location develops some organized society that is kind and friendly and would never engaged in forced labor, at that point it is effectively a separate country and you are exporting your criminals to them. This is not so much solving the problem of handling criminals as delegating it to someone else.
Exile makes sense as a punishment when you have an unpopulated wilderness area and the person is going to live in isolation. It stops making sense when all habitable land is already being used.
Administered by the state, of course. Open air prison where you can choose where to live, when to go to bed and wake up, what to eat, who to work with and so on, would feel a lot less constraining to the spirit than the prisons we have now.
I think that's the key factor to me. It's a bit hard to define. A punishment should punish, but not constrain the spirit. For example, a physical ball and chain (though it looks old-fashioned and barbaric) seems like an okay punishment to me, because it's very clear that it only limits the body. The spirit stays free, you can still talk to people, look at clouds and so on. Or in case of informational crimes, a virtual ball and chain that limits the bandwidth of your online interactions, or something like that.
My impression is this surprisingly didn't happen in Australia? But not sure about other instances.
Forced labor was definitely a thing, though it's hard to find much detail https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Australian-convict-settlements/628970
(This kids article was a lot more concise than other sources that focused on wildly different aspects)
The problem is that crowds are not known to be the coolest minds. When people talk about "community policing" they should acknowledge they have a position more akin to the NRA's on guns: "we think it is really important to keep this power in the hands of the people and we think a few more dead are a price worth paying for it". The idea that community policing won't ever result in injustice, accidental panicked shootings or lynching is nonsense. There are issues with professionalisation, but people who think that you can just have the best of both worlds by achieving some kind of grand societal enlightenment are deluded (and I expect would actually end up at the head of the lynch mobs, because they usually are the ones who lack self awareness the most and can't see how they could be wrong).
About 2: I think there are certain typical ideological malaises that are a risk for professionalised police and military forces regardless of the specifics of their job. "We are the only bastion against chaos, civvies can only afford to live peacefully because we make the hard calls, they should be more grateful and shut up" etc. Every category can develop an inflated sense of self importance, but of course if your job is to wield a monopoly on violence that's much more dangerous. In addition, there's the typical "if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail" issue. But it's not like community policing would be free from its own malaises, so whichever way one goes, control mechanisms have to be in place. I doubt there's some inherently stable system not at risk from people getting a little crazy, especially when violence is involved.
Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn’t logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do.
20 years ago or so, Eliezer Yudkowsky said that the biggest obstacle to raising the sanity waterline was religion. This seemed very reasonable at the time.
I'm unconvinced that's still true in the West. What seems the larger barrier now are the things people say and believe that ensure they'll keep getting invited to dinner parties.
I’m likely overlooking other factors of course, and there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I’ll be better equipped to unearth it.
You've identified a very powerful bias. If you're looking for easy wins to root out incorrect beliefs, have you considered first looking at all the ones that would dry up your dating pool if you stopped believing in them and told other people in your social circle about how you changed your mind?
If you're looking for easy wins to root out incorrect beliefs, have you considered first looking at all the ones that would dry up your dating pool if you stopped believing in them and told other people in your social circle about how you changed your mind?
Yes! A lot of filters seem to be consciously implemented, in the vein of "I know I shouldn't say this because it'll get me kicked out." But to make sure unconscious filters are also rooted out, I made it my mission over time to be more transparent about speaking my mind regardless of the social consequences. Surprisingly I can't say I experienced any fallout worth mentioning. I also recognize that I speak from a privileged position because my social life has been bustling for a while, so I wonder how much my tack would change if I wasn't so lucky.
I'd just like to say that I appreciate you writing about this, and congratulations on making your beliefs a little more self-consistent.
Unfortunately the reason people are reluctant to admit their mistake is that the potential return is usually negative. If you admit that you were the kind of person to espouse and defend an idea you suspect to be false even though you claim to have changed, that's mostly what people are going to conclude about you, especially if you add that espousing this idea gained you status. They may even conclude that you simply shifted course because it was no longer tenable, and not because you were convinced to be sincere.
I've certainly wondered this! In spite of the ACX commenter I mentioned suggesting that we ought to reward people for being transparent about learning epistemics the hard way, I find myself not 100% sure if it's wise or savvy to trust that people won't just mark me down as like "oh, so quinn is probably prone to being gullible or sloppy" if I talk openly about my what my life was like before math coursework and the sequences.
I think that (for this thing and many others too), some people are going to mark you down for it and some people are going to mark you up for it. So the relevant question is not "will some people mark me down" but "what kinds of people will mark me down and what kinds of people will mark me up, and which one of those is the group that I care more about".
Yes. So much love for this post, you're a better writer than me and you're an actual public defender but otherwise I feel super connected with you haha.
It's incredibly bizarre being at least a little "early adopter" about massive 2020 memes -- '09 tumblr account activation and Brown/Garner/Grey -era BLM gave me a healthy dose of "before it was cool" hipster sneering at the people who only got into it once it was popular. This matters on lesswrong, because Musk's fox news interview referenced the "isn't it speciesist to a priori assume human's are better than paperclips" family of thought experiments -- if you're on lesswrong, you are not safe from becoming an early adopter of something that becomes very salient and popular!
Due to this (helping rats prep for their "go mainstream" moment) as well as other things (one paragraph further down), I meant to write something kinda similar to your piece actually, cuz Ben Pace pointed me at this acx commenter:
I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time?
Certain risks around groupthink, not knowing about how to select for behaviors or memes that are "safe" to tolerate in whatever memetic/status gradient you find yourself in, even just defining terms like blindspot or bias ---- they all seem made a lot worse by young EAs/rats who didn't previously learn to navigate a niche ideology/subculture.
Super underrated topic of discussion on here! Thanks again for writing!
Certain risks around groupthink, not knowing about how to select for behaviors or memes that are "safe" to tolerate in whatever memetic/status gradient you find yourself in, even just defining terms like blindspot or bias ---- they all seem made a lot worse by young EAs/rats who didn't previously learn to navigate a niche ideology/subculture.
Why does it have to be niche? Haven't met many nonrationalists who's mind doesn’t go haywire once you start on Politics or Religion. Where did these EAs/Rats grow up if they weren't exposed to that?
Let's steelman the position a bit, because I believe you're putting "defund" and "abolish" into the same bucket.
I don't like the cops. But I think --- pessimistically --- as long as civilization exists, they will have their niche. Humans alive today are neither Homo economicus nor hunter-gatherers (with very few exceptions.) There is a subset of things humans are capable of doing that perhaps cannot be solved any other way without abandoning society as we know it. The hardline abolitionists I know either are okay with abandoning society or believe that that subset is empty. I cannot abandon society without forgoing modern medicine which I need to live, and I doubt the latter position.
Compare veganism, a topic perhaps more grokked by this audience. The analogous, comparative strawman is "abolish animal exploitation entirely." Yeah, that sure would be nice, and I think that actually defending this view as a bulwark against moderation is laudable, because it represents an ideal utopia --- but I don't see a path to it without first ending scarcity. The position that is actually held in my experience is "fight to minimize animal exploitation as much as possible." The former goal is acknowledged to be more or less impossible, but it represents a world for us to dream of.
When people say, "abolish the police," I think they dream --- laudably! --- of a post-scarcity utopia in which ethics has been solved, there is functionally infinite care for everyone, etc. I think that's a world worth dreaming about and fighting for, and part of that means holding the idealist bulwark. But --- I am a pessimist --- I do not believe we'll ever get there. But I can still say without self-contradicting that the surface area of things we need the cops for should be aggressively minimized. We don't need to torture and kill one moral patient per human per month, and we don't need to send the cops after people dying deaths of despair.
This, despite its recent usage as a thought-terminating cliche, is what I actually believe is meant by DTP; and it sounds an awful lot to me like the view you're endorsing.
I think they dream --- laudably! --- of a post-scarcity utopia in which ethics has been solved, there is functionally infinite care for everyone, etc
IMO the problem is that that is best conveyed by "in an ideal world, we wouldn't need the police", which is trivial but also not quite as shocking or snappy a motto. But people are interested in what we should and could do now; and besides, IMO, the socialist/anarchist position that if only we removed injustices like capitalism or whatever suddenly everyone would just be always good and nice is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. As long as there is more than one human on this planet there are chances for conflicts of interests to form and thus crime to be beneficial. This doesn't mean that the problem can't be vastly ameliorated, but blaming everything on capitalism or such makes the latter just a kind of religious boogeyman, and is not serious analysis.
I was raised as a liberal Quaker. I've never accepted the anarchist line of, "it'd all be fine if we just didn't have a coercive state", but I have thought a lot about how we could reduce the ethical toll of enforcing order. Moving away from 'punishment' towards 'prevention and curing' bad behavior. Where possible, using technology-enabled probation (a partial loss of privacy and freedom of movement) rather than imprisonment. Using improved technology and training to reduce need/probability for police violence. Focus on inventing new ways to keep both criminals and police safe, while still allowing police to be effective. What about police dogs with special training and tooth-guards which allowed them to disarm and restrain people without injuring them? This gets around asking a police officer to risk their life to disarm an armed suspect. Enforce traffic violations with traffic cameras which take video recordings based on AI-detection of unsafe driving, which then get flagged for human review. Similarly, lots of AI-monitored CCTV in public spaces, which can trigger police response for ongoing violent incidents.
Could we figure out a way for individuals to be compensated for anonymously identifying as 'at risk' for committing a particular sort of crime, and receiving anonymous preventative treatment? (e.g. a pedophile being able to easily get sexual desire suppressant treatment if they so chose. Or being allowed to sign themselves up for permanent technological probationary monitoring to prevent themselves from giving in to temptation, and in return being granted unlimited access to AI-generated porn catered to their desires...)
Lots of ways the justice system needs reform also.
For example, juries should be independent samples, each jury member unable to see or interact with the other jury members. Ideally, they should be viewing a recording so that anything 'stricken from the record' literally never gets seen by the jury. They should vote on verdict, with 'majority wins'. They should have to pass a simple nationally approved test about some basic aspects of responsibility of a juror to qualify for jury duty (obviously in my ideal, this test wouldn't be jerry-mandered to discriminate against certain groups). Ideally, they'd also have to pass a test proving they've understood the details of the case they are judging to a sufficient extent, but the juror should be able to fast-forward, 2x speed, and rewind the recording as they wish. Lawyers/plaintiffs shouldn't be allowed to review and dismiss potential jurors or even know anything about the jurors.
Another example: fines should be used less (they're a type of punishment), and when used should be proportional to the wealth of the accused (otherwise you are punishing poor people more than rich).
There are bad people out there who can be prevented from doing bad things only when they are physically restrained with chains and metal bars. Unless we develop some revolutionary new technology or fundamentally modify the nature of man, this is the reality we’re stuck with.
The second sentence is basically my motivation, that society is missing a trillion-dollar-bill-on-the-ground, in the form of "looking closer at how society treats 'just being an asshole', and probably treating it more like a health issue than a morality issue".
For context, a lot of ACAB-type leftists endorse an idea along the lines of "there are evil sociopaths who inevitably rise to the top of capitalist society, and they should be killed by everyone else". This, of course:
(The eugenics point deserves further remark: I don't know how often this idea has been laid out explicitly, but many leftists seem to have a kind of Anarcho-Primitivist mindset of "if someone misbehaves, we let the tribe / small group sort it out somehow". So if a 10-year-old seems like they are (or would grow up to be) a sociopath, the group would simply kill them.)
I've long meant to write a post series called "Cure, Don't Kill, Sociopaths", including a section "Cure, Don't Kill, The Rich", expanding on all this. It's also hard because, between motte-and-bailey and sanewashing and unstated assumptions and my own (inadequate) attempts at steelmanning, many of the things I argue against might not be written down anywhere.
(Also, on the "we should treat asshole-ness more like a normal illness" front, another post idea I have is "If We Treated Leprosy [or BPD or something] Like We Treat Sociopaths/Assholes", basically an intuition pump for a lot of this.)
Back on the main "curing sociopaths" idea, my We can easily imagine bad ways to do this (like genetically modifying all future newborns to be totally conformist/compliant, or classifying normal old disagreeableness as something that needs to be removed). I'm not saying there's a slam-dunk policy written down already that implements all this, or that there's no debate to be had about where to draw lines or how. I'm not even saying I'll agree with all the ideas I write in this comment, in a year.
I'm just saying that the policy "treat assholes as victims of their own scientifically-understandable condition" should be more people's default, and that it ought to be the main area people go into when trying to improve or replace the prison system. Especially when those people are already radical dreamers who believe in rehabilitation and drastic social change.
This is kind of like what happens with pedos. People don't choose to be attracted to children and that is very unfortunate for everyone involved but, up to the point when they commit actual crimes, not something they should be personally blamed for. But bringing up that treating pedos would actually be better for both them and the children often just elicits an angry response because, what, you care about pedos?!?
Was wondering how a criminal defense attorney could have ever believed that police shouldn't exist until I go to the end!
there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else.
I think negative visualization is useful for this. I made a list of implications for my beliefs & actions conditioning on the totally hypothetical case in which a particular political opinion of mine (no, I won't say which one) is wrong.
I noticed that I had some bucket errors along the lines of "I will have to admit to those nasty outgroup memers that I've been evil+dumb all along, and accept their righteous judgment!" Once I had written it explicitly, the correction pretty much wrote itself: good-vs-evil is oversimplified at best, being wrong doesn't make you dumb, and hateful memers deserve no one's attention, regardless of what faction anyone is in.
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
Confessions of an ex-ACAB
Until about five years ago, I unironically parroted the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) and earnestly advocated to abolish the police and prison system. I had faint inklings I might be wrong about this a long time ago, but it took a while to come to terms with its disavowal. What follows is intended to be not just a detailed account of what I used to believe but most pertinently, why. Despite being super egotistical, for whatever reason I do not experience an aversion to openly admitting mistakes I’ve made, and I find it very difficult to understand why others do. I’ve said many times before that nothing engenders someone’s credibility more than when they admit error, so you definitely have my permission to view this kind of confession as a self-serving exercise (it is). Beyond my own penitence, I find it very helpful when folks engage in introspective, epistemological self-scrutiny, and I hope others are inspired to do the same.
How Did I Get There?
For decades now, I’ve consistently held plain vanilla libertarian policy preferences, with the only major distinction being that I’ve aligned myself more with the anarchists. Whereas some were content with pushing the “amount of government” lever to “little”, I wanted to kick it all the way to “zero”. There are many reasons I was and remain drawn to anarchist libertarianism, and chief among them was the attractively simple notion that violence is immoral and that government is violence. The problem with moral frameworks is that they can be quite infectious. To pick on one example for demonstration’s sake, I notice that for many animal welfare advocates a vegan diet is heralded not just as the ideal moral choice, but also as the healthiest for humans, the least polluting, the cheapest financially, the best for soil conservation, the most water-efficient, the least labor-exploitative, et cetera & so forth. There’s a risk that if you become dogmatically attached to a principled position, you’re liable to be less scrutinizing when reflexively folding in other justifications. I suspect that happened to me with prisons, for example, where because I felt immediate revulsion at the thought of the state forcing someone into a cage, I was unwilling to entertain the possibility it could be justified. Ceding the ground on this particular brick was too threatening to the anarchism edifice I was so fond of.
Obviously if you advocate getting rid of the government, people naturally want to know what will replace it. Some concerns were trivial to respond to (I’m not sad about the DEA not existing anymore because drugs shouldn’t be illegal to begin with), but other questions I found annoying because I admittedly had no good answer, such as what to do with criminals if the police didn’t exist. I tried to find these answers. Anarchism as an umbrella ideology leans heavily to the far left and has a history of serious disagreements with fellow-travelers in Marxism. Despite that feud, anarchist thought absorbed by proxy Marxist “material conditions” critiques that blame the existence of crime on capitalism’s inequalities — a claim that continues to be widely circulated today, despite how flagrantly dumb it is. As someone who was and continues to be solidly in favor of free market economics, these critiques were like parsing an inscrutable foreign language. I was in college around my most ideologically formative time and a voracious reader, but I churned through the relevant literature and found nothing convincing. Instead of noting that as a blaring red flag, I maintained the grip I had on my preferred conclusion and delegated the hard work of actually defending it to someone else. I specifically recall how Angela Davis’s 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? (written by a famous professor! woah!) had just come out and the praise it was getting from my lefty friends. If this synopsis of the book is in any way accurate, Davis’s arguments are so undercooked that it should come with a health warning. The fact that I never read the book all the following years could have been intentional, because it allowed me a convenient escape hatch: whenever pressed, I could just hide behind Davis and other purportedly super prestigious intellectuals as my security detail. Back then, I carried the incredibly naive assumption that any position held by prestigious academics couldn’t be completely baseless…right?
Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn’t logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do. I navigated the social scene by prioritizing shared political values — let’s not discuss how I don’t support the minimum wage, focus instead on how much I hate the police and on how much I love punk rock. That worked really well. Putting “ACAB” on my Tinder profile was an effective signaling move that dramatically improved my chances of matching with the tattooed and pierced cuties I was chasing. Announcing at a party that you are so radical that you’re willing to eliminate prisons is an effective showmanship maneuver that few others have the stomach to challenge. There was plenty of social cachet motivating me to ignore niggling doubts.
How Did I Leave?
Whatever the outward facade, my position was crumbling behind it. Almost seven years ago I started working as a public defender and was inundated with hundreds of hours of police encounter footage that were completely uneventful; if anyone, it was usually my client who acted like an idiot. I’ve seen bodycam footage that starts with officers dropping their lunch in the precinct breakroom in order to full-on sprint toward a “shots fired” dispatch call. I’ve seen dipshits like the woman who attempted to flee a traffic stop while the trooper was desperately reaching for the ignition with his legs dangling out of the open car door. Despite this, the trooper treated her with impeccable professionalism once the situation was stabilized. At least about five years ago, I found myself in a conversation with a very normie liberal lawyer on the question of police/prison abolition. It was one of the first times I encountered serious pushback and I quickly realized just how woefully under-equipped I was. I distinctly remember how unpleasant the feeling was — not from the fear of being wrong about something, but rather the fear of being found out.
There were instances where I pulled bullshit what-I-really-mean defenses of ACAB and tried to pontificate about how it’s less about whether individual officers are per se “bastards”, but rather how the institutional role is blah blah blah. I played similarly squirmy motte-and-bailey games with the abolition topic when I was confronted with undeniable rebuttals. I found an example from almost 10 years ago of one of my most common responses, where I’d highlight some police scandal (e.g., cops seizing more stuff through civil forfeiture than is stolen from people by burglars) and accompany it with the eminently lukewarm “on net, society might be better off without police”. The argument is as abstract as it is unconvincing; soaring at an altitude too high for effective critique yet also too remote for anyone to care. Tellingly, I wouldn’t and couldn’t address the more pressing questions of how to deal with more serious crimes.
It was bizarre watching the discourse unfold during the 2020 BLM riots/protests. Almost overnight, the normie liberal demographic that previously was willing to push back on my inanity was now hoarse from screaming for police abolition. My younger self would’ve been thrilled watching the populace fully adopt radical anarchist sloganeering, but my actual self was aghast. I couldn’t believe these people were speaking literally (yep!) or whether they somehow discovered the elusive magic elixir that transformed police abolition into a viable policy proposal (nope!). I’m someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM’s policy proposals, and I even defended burning down a police precinct building in Minneapolis for fuck’s sake, and yet I didn’t join the defund chorus.
Still, there’s a noticeable bend to some of my writing from that time where I consciously mirrored some of the language du jour — such as making a bog standard argument against mass incarceration while aping abolition language, or responding to a DTP conversation by discussing police overcompensation. I haven’t changed my mind about anything I wrote there, but nevertheless it’s fair to accuse me of indirectly “sanewashing” the DTP issue. I took my boring, wonky arguments and adorned them with the faintest slogan perfume. This let me carry my hobbyhorses on the attention wave, but it also contributed to rehabilitating (however slightly) the totally crazy slogan position.
Now What?
I know it sounds crazy, but I think effective law enforcement is a vital component of any well-functioning society. Tons of cops are perfectly decent people who try to do the best they can at a difficult and unenviable job. There are bad people out there who can be prevented from doing bad things only when they are physically restrained with chains and metal bars. Unless we develop some revolutionary new technology or fundamentally modify the nature of man, this is the reality we’re stuck with. I still firmly believe there are loads of improvements we can make to the policing and incarceration we have, but abolishing it all is a delusional idea untethered from reality. Radical stance, I know.
Regarding the anarchist responses to the topic, the only coherent proposals I’ve ever encountered are from David Friedman and others on the anarcho-capitalist side (a variant thoroughly detested by left-wing anarchist thinkers who think it’s an affront even to consider it “real” anarchism). Friedman’s response is essentially a cyberpunk future with competing private companies offering insurance, security, and arbitration in one package. Friedman’s proposal is unusually thoughtful and coherent (the bar is low) and yet still remains largely a thought exercise reliant on some generous game theory assumptions. Who knows if it will or can ever work.
In terms of lessons learned, I should first note that introspection of this kind, spanning across such a long time period, will have significant blind spots and would be particularly prone to flattering revisionism. The most obvious mistake I made was in burying those unnerving moments of doubt. Instead of running toward the fire to put it out, I did my best to tell myself there was no fire. I had already arrived at a conclusion in my mind and worked backward to find its support, and I suppressed how little I could actually find. Whether intentionally or not, I fabricated comforting explanations for why my position was right even though I couldn’t directly defend it, often citing evidence that was more aspiration than reality. My ideological isolation kept me safe from almost all pushback anyways. And magnifying all of this were the social dynamics that rewarded me for keeping the horse blinders on.
I’m likely overlooking other factors of course, and there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I’ll be better equipped to unearth it.