It’s not the police that keep us from killing each other, or even laws that do so. Check out law and authority sometime if you’re able. It’s very short and worth a read. We don’t kill each other because we don’t enjoy being killed or killing. We’re social creatures, and don’t want to be shunned. Crimes of passion don’t really change based on laws, but the way we organize society may actually be increasing the number of murders, because some people are desperate enough to kill for food or shelter
I read half of it. It seems to overidealize the pre-law era to a large degree. Before law we had mass slavery, constant raiding of nearby tribes and nothing to prevent anybody from taking everything from a person. There is definitely a case where laws can become draconian and force people to break them but I’d argue that in most countries law prevent more unwanted behavior than cause it.
This especially doesn’t apply in modern times since you just need one person to create a private mercenary group to essentially create a mini kingdom within a loosely organised society. That person will very quickly be able to form a successful dictatorship by raiding, enslaving and demanding tribute from nearby settlements.
Even a laissez faire government with everything legal except violence will essentially make it legal to dump toxic waste on your front lawn everywhere without policing and laws. Toxic waste is currently being dumped with laws just under woefully loose law and I’d argue that we need more laws and regulation to prevent people from doing so.
I feel like anarchist theory quickly forgets that we had anarchy before law and people quickly formed kingdoms around settlements to defend themselves and aggressive kingdoms where more successful than passive ones.
Really, you can replace police and laws with any form of more or less organized sanctions against the perpetrators.
Law and authority is a good read, but it shows exactly that - without centralized power, people do (and, according to Kropotkin, people should) put system of unwritten controls all by themselves. And that keeps us from sliding into the savage world where everyone preys on one another. But if something breaks in this chain, if we accept the violence against one another, we’ll get extinct very rapidly.
What the hell are you talking about. I can assure you that perspective of jail is an excellent deterrent to crime
Or you know you can go ahead and be sodomized and beaten for 5 years if that’s your choice of things. For sure isn’t mine tho. It’s not even jail but the anal prolapse that is the true deterrent.
You people are completely detached from reality in the most stupid of ways. my sincere advice is to get real unless you want to self nominate to the Darwin Award
According to a quick search, the US has the 6th highest incarnation rate per capita but is only 148th lowest in intentional homicide rate. Obviously this is far from conclusive but it suggests there’s no strong correlation. There are likely much more significant factors than how prison-happy a country is.
This isn’t exactly an in depth study so I could still be wrong, but it’s much more convincing than just some assurance from a random stranger on the internet.