Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

First, recall that states are systems through which coercive force flows. Factions within a state may compete for support, leading to democratic surface phenomena, but the underpinnings of states are the systematic application, and avoidance, of violence. Land ownership, property, rents, dividends, taxation, court fines, censorship, copyrights and trademarks are all enforced by the threatened application of state violence.

As if we lived in a halcyon utopia prior to that. I can't buy into Assange's Manichean view of government, given the pre-governmental state of society as war of all against all, qua Hobbes: "In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Back when Wikileaks first came to prominence, it exposed malfeasance by private actors as often as states, notwithstanding the desire of those private actors to keep their doings private or even encrypted; Trafigure being a prime example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura).

States can certainly be destructive of liberty, but the absence of a state (either literally or by legal limitation ) does not necessarily yield liberty; often it results in mere libertinism.

Your argument is a non sequitur: states are necessary, therefore states are not systems through which coercive force flows.

If you want to argue that states are necessary, fine. But call a spade a spade. Can you imagine a state that doesn't wield violence? That's what a state is.

The lack of clarity on this issue leads to a lot of bad conclusions. When we argue that the state should solve any particular problem, we are explicitly saying the problem needs to be solved by coercive force. Maybe that's necessary. But let's not have any illusions about how states work and how laws are enforced.

> Can you imagine a state that doesn't wield violence? That's what a state is.

That's part of what a state is, but it's more than that. A state is a violent organization that has managed to convince the vast majority of society that its violent actions are acceptable. In any conceivable society (state or no state), you will have violence. The difference between "criminals" (druglords, thieves, rapists, etc.) and "government" is that the vast majority of society condemns the violence of the former but accepts (and often even praises) the violence by the latter.

> A state is a violent organization that has managed to convince the vast majority of society that its violent actions are acceptable.

Got that a bit backwards there. A state is a violent organization formed by society meant to enforce the rules of said society. We prefer the state to criminals generally because we have some say in how the state works or find its rules preferrable to the criminals.

We as individuals don't have a say in how the state works in any meaningful way. There is absolutely no difference, in practice or theory, between a "criminal" busting down my door or a "DEA agent" busting down my door. The fact that >50% of society supposedly approves of the "DEA agent" is no consolation and certainly no justification to the victim.

You can vote, and that is proportionally meaningful. Want more say, convince more people to agree with you.

You have zero say about anything criminals do.

There is a vast difference.

That's simply not true. The odds of my own actions being able to prevent or interrupt a common criminal are vastly higher than the odds of a single vote affecting the outcome of any but the smallest local election.

Again, proportions simply do not matter to the victim of violence. Like I said, if DEA agent busts down my door and shoots me, it is absolutely no consolation or justification that >50% of voters approve of drug prohibition. If you propose the question "is it okay for a robber to take 30% of my paycheck as long as 51% of my community is okay with it?" most people will say "of course not!," but if you propose the exact same question, but with "a robber" to "the government," most people will say "yes of course that's okay."

> The odds of my own actions being able to prevent or interrupt a common criminal are vastly higher than the odds of a single vote affecting the outcome of any but the smallest local election.

I'm not talking about a crime; I'm talking about government rule vs warlord rule. And the issue is which most people prefer, not which allows you a better chance to disobey.

> Again, proportions simply do not matter to the victim of violence. Like I said, if DEA agent busts down my door and shoots me, it is absolutely no consolation or justification that >50% of voters approve of drug prohibition.

It absolutely is consolation and justification for the majority of people who support that policy. You might not like it; but individual liberty is not unlimited and the will of society, right or wrong, beats the pants off any other form of government we've found.

> If you propose the question "is it okay for a robber to take 30% of my paycheck as long as 51% of my community is okay with it?" most people will say "of course not!," but if you propose the exact same question, but with "a robber" to "the government," most people will say "yes of course that's okay."

The robber is taking something without giving something back; the government is taking their share of your wages for services rendered to you as a citizen. Completely different situations.

> It absolutely is consolation and justification for the majority of people who support that policy.

Yes, but not for the victim of the policy. Slavery used to be approved by the vast majority of society.

> You might not like it; but individual liberty is not unlimited and the will of society, right or wrong, beats the pants off any other form of government we've found.

I don't like it, and I don't want to replace it with another form of government. My whole point in this thread has been that government actions are indistinguishable from actions which are widely accepted to be crimes, except that government has convinced society that its actions are acceptable.

> The robber is taking something without giving something back; the government is taking their share of your wages for services rendered to you as a citizen. Completely different situations.

Fine then, change my analogy to a robber that takes 30% of your paycheck, uses part of it to blow up some people in other countries, part of it to feed the poor, part of it to pay prison companies to contain nonviolent criminals, and part of it to build some roads.

> except that government has convinced society that its actions are acceptable.

Government is society, we are our government, it is not some entity that has tricked everyone. It does what it does because open your eyes and look around, people want it doing those things.

But you're still just saying that violence is fine as long as >50% of society approves of it. And that's being gracious, since there's no reason to actually believe that >50% of society approves of the actions of the government.

Violence is a natural and inevitable human trait, and is not necessarily wrong. There are times when it is OK, and is even the right thing to do. What better way to determine what those times are than democratically?

Your argument is a non sequitur: states are necessary, therefore states are not systems through which coercive force flows.

I did not say that at all. I am OK with states being systems through which coercive force flows, because I think channeling and supervising said force usually results of less of it flowing than otherwise would.

Can you imagine a state that doesn't wield violence? That's what a state is.

It's hardly the only distinguishing feature. States also build infrastructure, promulgate laws, provide forums for resolution of disputes and so forth. Your argument as made here is both narrow and immature.

All kinds of organizations and people build infrastructure; churches and companies also promulgate laws and provide dispute-resolution forums. What distinguishes the state from other organizations that perform similar tasks is that the state holds a monopoly on (legitimate) violence. This is not a "narrow and immature" point of view; this is the normal definition. Quoting Wikipedia:

The most commonly used definition is Max Weber's,[6][7][8][9][10] which describes the state as a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.

Perhaps a good intuition pump is how we react when this breaks down. If some group within a state's borders is using violence (i.e. sending soldiers to attack skyscrapers in another country), the attacked country has a cassus belli against the harboring country.

This feature is so critical to how the modern system treats territorial integrity that we sometimes refer to states which can't control violent groups within their own borders as "failed states."

Was this example really necessary? You basically said: If terrorists (who, by the way, happened to travel to Afghanistan once) attacked the WTC, the US have a casus belli against Afghanistan.

See, the reason why the war in Afghanistan is controversial is precisely because it is not clear that a country has a casus belli against another country if there is a (remote) connection of offenders to that country. In fact, the pilots lived and planned most of the plot in Germany.

A better example of a failed state would be the results of the war on drugs in Mexico.

Churches and companies don't promulgate "laws", they promulgate "rules." Rules have consequences to breaking them, but these consequences may vary widely in effect on the individual. A priest can try to make you feel guilty for breaking the religious edicts of his church, but if you don't consider his self-proclaimed authority in your life to have any basis, then guilt will be an ineffective consequence for breaking the rule. Companies, similarly, can fire you for breaking their rules, and while this deprives you of money and possibly opportunities, it does not deprive you of your life or freedom.

In short, the authority of these private organizations are opt-out, while the authority of the state is not.

It's circular logic to say that a state has a monopoly on only legitimate violence since it's the same state which defines which violence is legitimate and which is not. Can you think of any organizations that successfully exercise a monopoly on illegitimate violence? Successful states do not allow such activities to continue for long.

A state is, as others have already said, simply a political institution which exercises a monopoly on violence and determines how to apply it within its political domain.

It sounds like you think you disagree with me but I can't tell why. (Except for the semantic hairsplitting at the beginning, which is simply mistaken, but unrelated to the rest of the discussion.)

I believe his point is that taken to its logical conclusion, states are able to do all of the things that they do because there is inevitably the consequence of violence for non-compliance. All of your examples result in violence for disobedience: destroying infrastructure, breaking laws, ignoring subpeonas. A core idea is that property ownership requires the threat of violence to work; don't pay your rent but don't move out and the sheriff will show up sooner or later. Do you have an example of something a state does that is not actually supported by its power to wield violence?

Regardless of whether a state exists or not, the only meaningful definition of "property" includes a threat of violence. It is not meaningful to say "this is mine" without the implied threat of violence against those who would take it - whether carried out by the individual themselves or outsourced to the local emperor.

Without property there is not commerce, there is not agriculture, no civil growth and development to speak of.

As for your first paragraph, of course. I was just pointing out how things are with states, but you're right that for property it extends to individuals. As for your second, communism begs to differ, but it hasn't done so admirably in the world...

http://dbzer0.com/blog/private-property-vs-possession

It would be nice if a society could exist that wasn't reliant on violence and also not suck, but I'm not sure if it's really possible.

Oh and "this is mine" has meaning in the context of a relationship where one party will simply be upset if the object is taken and the other party cares enough about them not to take it for that reason, even though there is no threat of violence if they do. This is how many couples and families work.

There is a difference between defensive violence and offensive violence. For example, do you believe that you own your body? I do, and I would defend myself if necessary. I would only use violence against those that are threatening me though. If you hold that you own your body, then by extension you own the output of the things you create with your body.

There has been much thought on this line of philosophy, it's called the non-aggression principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle)

Violence is a valid perspective through which to understand all that a state is. This is true. The existence of the state is to provide mechanisms to regulate violence so that it can be directed in a moderately controlled fashion; this has been true from village chieftains to imperial legions to the FBI and KGB.

This can be a useful perspective, but it's rarely actually used to any intellectual benefit: people generally bring it up only as an excuse to dismiss the concept of statehood as worth exploration, because we've internalized the notion of violence as bad. It's just libertarian fear-mongering, and it drives away discussion of real issues of violence from the public arena into the private backrooms of government where we don't have a say because we act like a lynch mob when it comes up.

I think it's important simply to be aware of how things work. I certainly wasn't advocating libertarianism or even any other political position.

The thing is that the violence-based perspective isn't "how things work". It's simply one way to explain how things work, and it's a wildly ineffective one with a bare minimum of explanatory power: enough, mostly, to set up a false dichotomy between "bad violent people, i.e. amoral men in black with guns" and "you, who are totally not a violent person but would be only if forced, right?"

I didn't say that the violence-based perspective is how things work, I said that it's important to understand how things work and the implication there in my mind was that the violence-based perspective is an important part of that. I thought it was just too obvious to mention that there are many lenses through which to see the world.

For me, the way to refute Assange's point that states depend on violence and are therefore bad is not to say no they don't, or that that's not a useful perspective, but rather, "Look at the wondrous things we can build using our ability to marshal force effectively."

When I first heard about this violence-based perspective, it threw into question the notions of society and in particular human rights that I had from my high school education, because as you say, we have this internalized notion that violence is bad.

But now that I understand that rights really are just agreements between people that are brought into existence by violence, it actually makes me glad to have this violence around, and I don't see it as a universally bad thing. Nevertheless, I would prefer a society in which there is as little violence as possible, but I'm not by any means convinced that the answer there is "less state".

How do you measure the is-ness of the state? By it's budgetary expenditures? Many existent states (like Canada) have relatively small military budgets. For them, wielding or even threatening to wield violence is not their primary reason for being. Their primary reason for being is to ensure the health and welfare of their citizens, and they do so not by threat of violence, but by collection and distribution of taxes and passing of laws.

The vast majority of people in most democratic societies do not require the threat of arrest and imprisonment to follow the majority of laws. Assuredly there are minor disagreements about which the validity of certain laws, and many people cheat a little here and there. But when the majority of citizens believe that the majority of the law, and the state which imposes it, is unjust, you have an authoritarian government, and a revolution is inevitable.

It might also be worth noting that even if, based on budgetary spending, the US government is primarily an institution of the force and its display, most of that is happening outside of US soil. Most of it, in fact, is deployed in protecting sea lanes for the benefit of shipping and the people who rely on it: namely, everyone on Earth. I'm not American, and I don't like everything about America, but I'm damn grateful for the fact that the American government is funding the security of the machinery which keeps food and goods flowing around the world, since a lot of people where I live (Canada) would have difficulty surviving the Winter (and maybe even in Summer) without it.

To what extent global commerce and trade are just or unjust is another question, but I suggest it can be addressed on a case-by-case basis, and that the vast majority is far more beneficial than detrimental to everyone involved.

The definition of a state as a "geographic monopoly on the legitimate use of violence" is not particularly controversial.

It is the definition of a state as started by Max Weber and sociologists in the tradition of political realism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

Max Weber's definition is used by wide variety of political factions, and is not a construct of anarchists\libertarians. During the Iraq War when discussing the use of mercenaries, the current President Barack Obama was quoted as stating:

"the core of our military relations to our nation, and how accountability is structured, you are privatizing something which sets a nation state apart, which is a monopoly on violence." [1]

Any action that is legitimate for the state institution to enforce, but would not be legitimate or legal for a non-state institution to enforce, derives its legitimacy from this monopoly on violence. This definition is simply stating that unlike other social insitutions, the state is the only institution which has the power to commit legal incarceration, execution, and confiscation.

The fact that non-state organization cannot impose taxes upon individuals and threaten fines and incarceration for non-payment indicates that taxation is a forcible (violent) means of appropriating revenue. If it were not, the revenue would be referred to as a donation, purchase, charity, or trade.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewQl-qAtNwQ

"Many existent states (like Canada) have relatively small military budgets. For them, wielding or even threatening to wield violence is not their primary reason for being. Their primary reason for being is to ensure the health and welfare of their citizens, and they do so not by threat of violence, but by collection and distribution of taxes and passing of laws."

The definition of a state as an institution which wields a geographic monopoly on violence is agnostic towards the "purpose" of the state. The definition concerns the means not the ends of the state. The goals of states are diverse and change over time, but their fundamental principles of operation do not.

"The vast majority of people in most democratic societies do not require the threat of arrest and imprisonment to follow the majority of laws."

Consider if this statement would remain true (and if so, for how long) if the threat of state violence were not present.

Assange speaks truth. You cannot deny the fundamentals of the state are violence. The US speaks already of a capacity for instant global weapon strikes within the hour. You claim it is wrong to question the system, implicitly suggesting there is no alternative. But anthropology shows clearly that premodern societies had more free time, greater material and economic equality. (Try 'Debt: The First 5000 Years').

You attack a perspective, quoting on a tangent, without contributing anything meaningful except the notion that government can have value: but of course! Nobody denies this.

Assange and other politically engaged hackers like him seek improved systems of governance: greater protection of fundamental freedoms, greater availability of additional freedoms, greater truth and transparency.

Relax, nobody wants to topple your car and burn your house down.

I don't at all disagree with you but for the benefit of the others I'd like to ask you, what do you mean by truth? (What do you indicate by the term of truth?)

edit: To say something is truth if it's true is too circular - as a definition it doesn't have matters that can be confirmed by others so isn't so helpful to convince them.

> But anthropology shows clearly that premodern societies had more free time, greater material and economic equality.

I already disagreed with the grandparent comment, but I need to criticize this too: those metrics are terrible, and we shouldn't be looking to the past for the good old days.

Free time: only if you don't consider all the free time lost by all the people who died as children (extremely high premodern child mortality).

Material and economic equality: being equally poor is not really a solution anyone would like.

Well, the metrics could definitely use some work and context, but there is some real truth behind them. Up until the 18th century or so, non-state spaces existed in abundance, and given a choice between either being a subject of a sedentary state or being a person outside state control, you were nearly certainly better off by choosing the latter. Many people did, in fact, and there was a constant flux of people out of and into state spaces. It was only when technology became sufficiently developed that virtually everyone was subjected to the State.

But I don't think there are any humans who can live free from social constructs. Living in a tribe, or under a warlord seems like the antithesis of freedom in the sense that most are discussing here.

> we shouldn't be looking to the past

History informs the present and future. My point in bringing up anthropology was that the OP's implicit suggestion that there is no alternative is demonstrably invalid.

> being equally poor

I would also heartily recommend the same book to you. It's quite an eye opener.

> Free time: only if you don't consider all the free time lost by all the people who died as children (extremely high premodern child mortality).

That's only relevant if all those children died due to some specific form of government being in effect.

You claim it is wrong to question the system, implicitly suggesting there is no alternative.

No I didn't. How can you expect me to engage with the rest of your comment in any serious fashion when you just make up claims like this?

I read your "As if we lived in a halcyon utopia prior to that..." paragraph as implicitly denying alternatives to the status-quo of modern society. Apologies if this was not your intent; in any case, in that paragraph you have done essentially to Assange's views what I did with my comment to yours. Haha :) May we all live long and prosper; peace amongst all.

I'm not denying alternatives to it; I'm pointing out that absent a state people still employ violence to assert things like land and property rights, and usually in a more direct and short-term fashion at that.

This is a complete straw man. Assange wasn't calling for the abolition of government, nor did he say they're the only ones who do bad things.

Further, Hobbes' state of nature has zero grounding in empirical fact. Which historical state of nature does it refer to?

> Which historical state of nature does it refer to?

Hobbes' state of nature is probably an ahistorical argument. That all men used to live under a state of nature is not necessary to Hobbes' argument. It is a thought experiment, showing the consequences of there not being a state, and allowing him to infer the rights of the people within the state. In terms of history, Hobbes would have had in mind cases contemporary to him when state authority collapsed and violent chaos took hold -- the English Civil War etc.

He is not arguing from history, and to dismiss his argument on that ground alone might risk disengaging from what Hobbes' was trying to get at.

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