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In your frustrated rage, you have failed to give as much thought to the pitfalls of authoritarianism as you have to the pitfalls of liberalism. The first step to saving our civilization, at least in the sense that I care for it as a civilization, is not for tens of thousands of people to go kill the local subway-screaming bums. Lock them up? Maybe. Kill them? No.
Life doesn't work like that. You can't just have some kind of society-wide spree of murdering undesirables and find that somehow, all of the things that you actually like about liberal modernity have survived. You aren't going to come back from all of the mob justice with your hands dripping with blood and then just calmly pick up with fairness and rule of law as if nothing had happened. The mob justice will kill innocents together with guilty and, even if you don't care about having killed the guilty, still the innocent will either be on your conscience forever or you will degrade into the sort of person who has no conscience.
The apocalyptic cleansing that you dream of will encourage many bestial things to stir. Your political system will lurch towards being ruled by corrupt strongmen who promise the mob easy solutions. The post-cleansing society will be tempted to solve everything simply. You might find an angry mob on your doorstep not long after, maybe because you have too much money or because you do not have enough, maybe because you know the wrong people or do not know the right ones. You might find some uniformed thugs coming for you one night simply because someone denounced you to the local authorities.
No, we should not allow insane people to roam the subways threatening others. But there are many possible solutions between "do nothing" and "kill them all". "kill them all" might feel emotionally satisfying, but I doubt that you would actually like the kind of society that you would find yourself living in afterwards, and you might not like yourself much afterwards either.
Locking them up is an option for a political entity with a jail and a staff; it's not something an individual can do. Those political entities (the city and state of New York) have chosen to do otherwise. That means the locals either must put up with the subway-screaming bums no matter what they do, or they must use less-measured force. It's a bad situation, but it's certainly not clear that making everyone put up with the aggressive drug-addled mentally-ill violent people is better for civilization than allowing direct action be taken against them.
Are you sure? And even if not, maybe most people would prefer the aggressive drug-addled mentally-ill violent people dead over whatever they lose by that happening... perfection, after all, is rarely an option.
Or, alternatively, they can empower the city and the state to use such necessary force to lock them up. The fact that they haven't suggests that the people would prefer to deal with the occasional nuisance of subway bums than subject them to what they feel are the deleterious effects of "the system". To suggest that individuals should have the power to unilaterally decide to take matters into their own hands makes a mockery of any pretense to having a rule of law. What if a similar mob thought that certain posts on The Motte were inherently racist and not appropriate for civilized society and therefore, since the state and national legislatures have chosen to do nothing, track down the authors of those posts and beat them within an inch of their lives? Would you find this behavior opprobrious? Once you come to the conclusion that individuals and mobs should trump the laws of political entities you disagree with, you empower all such people to act as they will, not just the ones you happen to agree with.
I'm glad you're defending this line of argument. That said, it's not clear to me that decentralised enforcement of the law is going to lead to widespread violence and vigilanteism. It always amazed me that police forces were relatively rare in both the ancient and medieval worlds, and that was largely due to a combination of collective enforcement of norms and the ability of wealthy respectable private citizens to pay for investigators/private muscle.
I'm not say that's better than our present arrangement, or that it's compatible with the luxury liberalism we enjoy today, but in many cases it worked surprisingly well.
You can have decentralized legal systems, but there still has to be some sort of widespread buy-in (or what we might call meta buy-in, where different groups have their own legal system, but still with some other authority to resolve inter-group disputes, and each group still experiences buy-in from its own members). If you could get that level of buy-in, you could probably just make the city government of New York actually enforce laws, and it would be much easier, and with many fewer nasty side effects.
One example I'd flag here is the Philippines, which amazingly has a lower per capita crime rate than the US and the UK, but which is VERY reliant on private security and community justice. The middle class live in gated communities, private security guards are everywhere, and justice is swiftly and pretty brutally implemented. Here is a really funny scene from the movie La Visa Loca where a British tourist gets his bag snatched by a thief. After he's arrested by private security guards, the British tourist is invited to beat the shit out of the guy before they call the police.
Another example - back when she was a teenager one of my Pinoy wife's friends was sexually assaulted in a Manila club. The next day her brothers and cousins had established the name of the guy, and went to his family and explained they were going to teach him a lesson. The guy's family basically agreed and they fixed the terms of the beatings (e.g., nothing that would leave him permanently disabled). A few hours later a dozen 20-something men jumped the guy as he was leaving work and kicked seven shades of shit out of him. Thus was justice done, and justice was perceived to have been done, and a precedent was enforced in the wider community.
India has pretty low crime, something I would also warrant is due to our extrajudicial punishment.
Thieves often get severely beaten up before the cops get there, and the latter happily turns a blind eye.
Frankly, I trust the community at large to police violent crimes themselves, having your ass handed to you makes your bad life decisions much more poignant than a stint in prison, especially for scum with low time preference.
The last argument is one for corporal punishment over prisons, not for mob justice.
And the big issue with mob justice isn't that thieves get beaten up, it's that sometimes the person getting beat up didn't actually do anything except be an outsider and look funny. Or more generally, that the less formal the mechanisms of justice, the more they become about social standing. India does keep popping up in international news about various gangrapes and coverups thereof because the rapists are friendly with/members of the police, which is enabled by the same mechanisms that enable your beatings.
Gangrapes and coverups are far less common than petty thieves and hooligans getting a beating or two, and if the former is the cost of minimizing the latter, I'll take it.
In the vast majority of cases, the person being beaten up isn't some poor bastard in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone caught pickpocketing, trying to snatch purses and the like. Those don't make international news, whereas sectarian strife and rapes do, so the West had a grossly skewed perspective.
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