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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   29610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no. This is where the idea of disrupting police, "de arresting" people, rioting, etc. comes from. They don't agree that the state should have the ultimate power to enforce laws that they don't agree with. In this case they seem to disagree with immigration laws, and because of this disagreement they don't believe that ICE/DHS has a right to enforce these laws.

This is a big problem. An actual threat to democracy. Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced. A small (but growing) contingent of the left does not believe that that is legitimate, and therefore believe that they have the right to use force to oppose this.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here? These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that. Aside from some sort of science fiction style deprogramming effort: how do you bring them back to reality?

This is a question that genuinely troubles me.

does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

Of course it does, except when it doesn't.

Very few people have anything approaching a coherent political philosophy. I would assert that the vast majority of people never think about the state in terms of the monopoly of violence. Maybe they heard it in school, but they never internalized the concept.

I am and was always skeptical of how Trump would be able to pull mass deportations off because of this. Even if there wasn't actually violence, the media would manifest it like in Texas where they used forced perspective to make it look like the illegal aliens were getting whipped. Law enforcement is inherently violent, and with millions of interactions there was going to be violence, and scissors.

Not just inherently, definitionally violent. Every single thing the police do is something being done against the will of the person it is being done to.

I wasn’t aware that having my passport and ID card renewed or being granted a drivers license was ”definitionally violent”…

If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply. Your drivers license is the state's permission to drive without falling afoul of the state's monopoly on violence. Whether this is the non-central fallacy or not, it is practically how society works. We just abstract much of the unpalatable stuff away behind a veneer of civility so we don't need to remind ourselves of how violent the world is and how fragile peace is.

If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply.

This is a perfect example of precisely what I spoke about here:

There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.

If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?

I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.

That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.

If anything the parent x child interaction is very similar to the government x citizen one. I don't think the violence based enforcement holds for every other domain.

It appears to me that for voluntary contractual interactions, violence is not the fundamental enforcement mechanism. Take your job, if you don't wish to do something you can leave, if you boss wants you to do something and you refuse, they can stop paying you. No violence needed. Friend group social situations: no violence either. Generally, voluntary contractual interactions are enforced by reputational damage, trade/compensation, or right to association.

The parent x child much like the government x citizen is one of forceful unchosen hierarchy, in the sense that it is forced upon you and only through extreme measures, at great personal costs, can it be severed. And since you did not chose to participate the really only enforcement mechanism that is available for the government or your parent is to threaten you with further violence if you refuse to comply.

It would be different if we were still a tribal society and people could just leave society, go out on their own if they did not wish to engage in the social compact. However, the edges of the map are gone, and there isn't really anywhere people can leave to. Just merely exchanging one tyrant for another.

Take your job, if you don't wish to do something you can leave

What if you don't leave? Remember to apply the assumption of maximal-opposition at every stage.

Considering my office doesn't have food, my badge is disarmed and there is limited cell signal, eventually I will need to leave. Combined with needing to make payments for life needs and am not being paid, I could maximally wait around until I am destitute, homeless, with no food or money in a stubborn attempt, but I doubt my job will care. They literally can just wait me out. My computer requires credentials to login, The SCIF has no bathroom, and needs a badge to get back in. Once I leave the building I won't be able to get back in, frankly once I exit the elevator I can't get back in.

So essentially 3 days of hobo-ing it at the office.

Maximal-Opposition isn't a required assumption. The Government doesn't describe arresting law breaking citizens as "Maximal-Opposition" and my parents very much spanked me as a kid and I doubt they would consider corporal punishment as "Maximal-Opposition" in respect to defiance either.

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