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I'm having a bit of trouble following this.
I did, in fact, read Leviathan and participate in a discussion group about it, but don't remember all that much about it. It seems obviously true that it's better to live in a society with basically functional norms and consequences around interactions between individuals, groups, and governments than not. And that there are a lot of examples of what that "not" looks like, and they can get really bad.
Present day America certainly is inculturating a social norm that some people might act extremely unpleasant in public, and everyone else needs to politely ignore that unless they are actively harming someone (or maybe not then depending on the kind of harm). Public schools actively cultivate this dynamic from the earliest years with the way they integrate the very least integratabtle special education children, by letting them scream and bite in the name of "inclusion" (though there are limits on the amount of biting and scratching that is tolerable, since they don't want to lose staff constantly), rather than letting them have quiet, privacy and space, whether or not they would prefer that (the screaming, biting ones certainly do look like they might prefer it), and no matter the cost. There's certainly an argument to be made that this is bad.
On the other hand, violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is obviously not the default. Warring clans might be the default. Subways are not the default. Millions of strangers all peacefully taking public transportation to their cubicles every day, ignoring the one crazy person screaming threats is absolutely the opposite of a default way of managing society. It is a wonder of civilization. The default, given the possibility of a hundred million people cooperating and a few defectors, might then be to hang or exile the defectors. But we are generally so secure (And in general we are! That's precisely why almost everyone just ignores the screaming crazy person, because it so rarely escalates to violence) that we're tending toward complacency which, yeah, is probably a mistake.
Can things break down surprisingly quickly and violently? Yes. Liberals probably know that? Apart from actual wars, they do know about things like gang violence in cities, even very wealthy cities, even with tons of various expensive "programs." Just, maybe they will say that it isn't done right, or isn't enough, rather than saying that the neighborhood has degenerated into a state of nature and needs to be civilized by force. But the liberals have a bit of a point, in that when the US government tries to civilize by force, it has often done a terrible job of it.
I spent some time living with a Albanian family in Kosovo. They had been shelled during the war, then mostly rebuilt, though a co-worker mentioned several times that he was concerned that they used to have a lot more cows, herds of cows they would lead through the fields, and now they only had a few, and he interpreted that as poverty and dysfunction. I have never had any cows, and they do seem like a very tough culture, optimized for toughness and not getting swallowed up by the surrounding civilizations, no matter how many sons had to go serve as janissaries through the years. But America can and does swallow them and everyone else up anyway, because that's what we're optimized for. Conservative Americans seem to think this is a fair trade, since we're all much better off materially in America. I'm unsure what the conservative Albanians think, other than that they like and are attached to their cows, flia, clothing, fields, and everything else.
That was unusually rambling, because, again, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. Perhaps my own social milieu is too much of a mix of conservatives, liberals, people underwriting Dreamer loans, people who have had to change jobs because their workplace suddenly started operating entirely in Spanish with the thermostat at 90 degrees, people who have read Hobbs, and people who milk goats to notice?
Did Neely actually violently attack anyone? From the wiki article it sounds like he was just screaming at people and disturbing the peace. Perhaps he deserved to get roughed up for that, but getting killed seems a bit of a reach.
That's part of the problem: oh, he's just screaming and threatening, ignore it. We can't have him arrested and taken off the train, that would be intolerable racist prejudice. We can't deal with these kinds of disturbances as they used to be dealt with in the past, so just accept the new consensus of Bike Cuck(a dreadful term, but the best example of the mindset). Only losers take the bus, or the subway, anyway so it's not like anyone important is inconvenienced by mentally ill people roaming around with the possibility of becoming violent. Really, you should be cycling or walking everywhere instead of using public transport, reduce your carbon footprint! It's your fault for being in a confined space you can't get out of, with a crazy person who might decide they want to rip your face off because they don't like the colour of your jacket!
No, that doesn't warrant being killed. But neither does it warrant the ordinary people on the subway being subjected to this 'disturbing the peace' as the new normal, either.
I’m not sure what your point is. It seems we agree that the legal system is too lax on shitty mentally ill people, and we also agree that this doesn’t justify vigilante violence going too far?
Taking these two statements together results in "The legal system will allow mentally ill people to menace others, and they may do nothing but stand there and take it". If the legal system doesn't deal with these menaces, and doesn't allow others to deal with it, it is in all practical effect putting the full force of the state behind the menace.
The more the king is perceived as a tyrant instead of a font of justice, the less the 95 IQ masses cooperate voluntarily, and the less voluntary cooperation the weaker the social contract is. The sovereign doesn’t have a panoptic iron hand because of his telepathic powers; he rules because men obey him.
Yes, he rules because men obey him. But obviously only some men will obey him voluntarily. As long as he has enough of those, the rest don't matter. He can choose to enforce an order where thieves and violent people are kept down and the other people are left to go about their business in peace. Or he can choose to enforce an order where the thieves and violent people are given significant leeway and the others are left in fear of them on the one hand and the sovereign on the other. Either way works, as long as his cops and soldiers are willing to stick with him.
The second way, arguably, works even better -- unlike the thieves and violent people, the ordinary people will stay on the side of the sovereign even when the sovereign works against them, because they believe in such things as the sovereign's legitimacy. Tell a thug that he's forbidden from violently defending himself from threats because he might get it wrong and his attacker's life is worth at least as much as his, and he'll laugh and maybe stab you. Tell an ordinary citizen that and (we know, because it has already happened, and in fact the previous incarnation of this board schismed over exactly this) he'll consider it and quite likely accept it. Of course the cops, being cut from a similar sort of cloth (if a somewhat finer weave) as the thugs, won't accept it... but they get an exemption.
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