Why We Will Defund the Police & Abolish the Prisons
Twelve arguments that are each precisely five hundred words long, written by Daniel Penny’s prospective jurors.
Can you pull in Leviathan with a hook, or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you pierce its nose with a hook, or tie shut its jaw with a cord? Will it keep on begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words? Will it make an agreement with you, for you to take it as your slave for life?
The Book of Job
Now, brothers and sisters, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying “peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.
First Epistle to the Thessalonians
The overall degeneration of man down to what today appears to the socialist dolts and flatheads as their ‘man of the future’—as their ideal—this degeneration and diminution of man into the perfect herd animal… this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims is possible, there is no doubt of it. Anyone who has once thought through this possibility to the end knows one kind of nausea that other men don’t know.
Beyond Good and Evil
1. Because politics is the continuation of war by other means.
Word count: 500
The civilizations which built our world—from ancient Athens to imperial Britain—did so without official institutions for policing, prosecuting, or imprisoning their subjects. I believe that our civilization lacks their vitalism, and that such civilizational vitality is upstream from progress, and that their approach to internal enemies was vital to their civilizing process.
From 1300 to 1800, the typical English town had a night watch, constable, sheriff, and/or for-hire “thief-takers.” But these operated by draft-lottery (like juries), royal appointment (like judges), or fee-for-service (like attorneys), and were basically nonexistent compared with contemporaneous law enforcement regimes in continental Europe. Victims hired constables or thief-takers to arrest suspects, prosecutors to try them, and witnesses to condemn them. Courts paid rewards for convictions; merchants paid sheriffs for indentured convict labor, or else corporal punishment sufficed. Sheriffs conscripted posses comitatus—“the power of the community”—to subdue public threats. And judges empaneled grand juries to testify about every crime they’d recently witnessed.
Courts monopolized local government activities. Judges rotated through towns on regular circuits, at the king’s pleasure, to counter the nobility. They’d hear common cases, regulate crucial prices, oversee road maintenance, charter new bridges, grant ordinary licenses, and more, with much leeway (given that statutory law didn’t yet meaningfully govern such things). This minimalist state capacity would be infeasible for modern infrastructure, but England’s homicide rate by 1800 was—despite that period’s lack of nutrition, evidence, medicine, opportunity, etc—about equal to its present level. And yet prison didn’t really exist as a punishment until transportation to the US became unviable in 1776, and police didn’t really exist until 1829.
The US followed a similar trajectory, back when it was vibrant. Indeed, our national homicide rate fell by 75% from 1800 to 1950, entirely thanks to the settlement of rural areas and western frontiers with such rough justice; meanwhile, our long-settled cities—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, etc—had remarkably stable homicide rates from before independence (i.e. long before they had police and prisons) until just after WWII. Crime only became disproportionately urban since then, when out-of-touch elites hamstrung law-and-order with unworkable do-gooder theories. In other words, the Warren Court already abolished real policing, and only mass incarceration restored some peace. But this clearly gave us the worst of both worlds.
Arrests-per-felony collapsed as felony sentence lengths exploded. Consider that national homicide clearance rates have steadily fallen from 90% in 1965 to 60% in 2019 (and plummeted further since), while prison populations ballooned. And yet criminology’s clearest finding is that—intuitively—violent criminals are disincentivized by short, sharp, certain shocks, not by middling odds of long future confinement. Further, almost all serious offenses are committed by a few easily-identifiable serial offenders: in D.C., for example, the average homicide suspect has 11 prior arrests.
I believe in “the power of the community” to whip these vagabonds into shape again. Healthy cultures take responsibility for putting down such threats, and such muscular habits—not abstract arguments—create our actual rights and our living traditions. There should be ticker-tape parades for strong samaritans.
2. Because serious crimes come from serial criminals, not social incentives.
Word count: 500
There are three basic truisms in criminology, which are highly intuitive, well-substantiated, and mutually consistent. Properly understood, they suggest that most crime is a symptom of individual criminality; that serious criminals don’t respond well to normal incentives; and that effective criminal justice would thus focus on identifying them for incapacitation. I believe that certain incremental reforms in this direction would be popular, feasible, and humane.
The first such truism is that a few serial offenders commit almost all serious offenses. For example, in Sweden, one percent of the population commits two-thirds of all violent crimes; likewise, in D.C., the average homicide suspect has 11 prior arrests. Criminologists generally believe—based on decent theoretical and empirical arguments—that the criminality in each jurisdiction should fit a power-law distribution, which is incredibly unequal: as you focus on an exponentially smaller share of the worst criminals, you tend to discover that they have exponentially worse records. In other words, a few clear outliers cause massive public harm.
Secondly: criminals respond to punishment certainty, not sentence length. There are countless well-done papers which clearly show this (many are described in detail on Jennifer Doleac’s podcast). But it’s also just obvious. Do you think that violent thugs know the current sentencing guidelines, and make decisions based on possible long-term consequences? Yet they typically avoid acting out right in front of cops or cameras; and they quickly figure out when policies or practices around arrest, bail, and non-prosecution radically change. Hence the sudden and persistent 50% increase in black homicides nationwide after George Floyd’s death, when stops, detentions, and convictions plummeted for blacks.
And, finally, confinement works by incapacitating harmful persons, not by disincentivizing harmful acts. From 1930 to 1960, 0.7% of US adults were institutionalized (with about 85% held in mental hospitals, and 15% incarcerated). This total combined institutionalization rate fell to 0.3% by 1980, entirely because the asylums began closing down: they now hold just 20,000 people. Simultaneously, the homicide rate fully doubled—so the adult incarceration rate then rose from its long-term stable norm of 0.1%, and reached 0.6% by 2000, at which point violent crime fell back down to 1950s levels. In other words, disorderly violence returned to the pre-sixties norm when the warehoused population share did too… albeit now under the pretense of “justice” and “incentives” rather than constraint.
Longer sentences explain about 80% of this prison population boom; higher arrests-per-capita explain the rest. But arrests-per-crime, convictions-per-arrest, and imprisonments-per-conviction didn’t increase. Thus we’re still just removing individual criminals, while pretending to punish individual crimes. However, our post-sixties cargo cult of due process and human uniformity has created far more constitutional issues than it’s resolved, and it necessarily subjects normal citizens to a tyranny of either lawless animals or inhuman penalties. So given that 98% of convictions come from plea bargains anyway, why not return to “civil commitments” for our underclass? This brief, inefficient, and punitive experiment with mass incarceration has clearly failed—the public demands a tried-and-true technocratic solution.
3. Because tigers ride the subway now, and only warriors can ride them away.
Word count: 500
Western peoples have long celebrated the height of spring with animalistic “May Day” rituals. British pagans decorated maypoles and pranced around them deliriously, thanking their goddess Flora for another timely bloom. American anarchists threw pipe bombs at police in 1886, and the Marxist International promptly created “International Workers Day” to commemorate that heroic act (which our federal government has officially recognized for well over a century now). It’s why riot season usually begins around this time.
On May 1st of this year, a friendly tiger—widely known by New Yorkers for the cute little tricks that he’d perform, to beg tourists for trinkets and scraps—tragically died at the hands of a vet. Memorial marches will probably light various funerary pyres across the city for “Mr Neely” (the tiger’s nickname, because of how he’d sometimes kneel on command in exchange for tips). A widely circulating video captured his final moments, writhing on his back amidst the legs of subway riders… mutely gasping for breath as the former marine choked him out from behind. There are widespread calls to sacrifice this “Mr Penny,” in recognition of the fact that we all owe change to these beloved street performers.
Multiple witnesses claim that Neely made no specific threats towards any particular passengers, and had merely behaved in a broadly threatening manner toward society in general when he entered the train car, and the doors closed behind him, and he bared his fangs and spat at the commuters, who weakly looked away. After all, public transit requires everyone to make some compromises, to accommodate each other, and who are we to complain—as humans—when some animal has to vent after a presumably rough week? He hadn’t yet mauled or eaten anyone when the one-man lynch mob took him down.
Neely led a troubled life. Zookeepers had recaptured him over 40 times. For example, once, when they caught him dragging a prepubescent girl into an alley, he languished behind bars again for four whole months. Likewise, he was wanted for disfiguring an elderly woman in 2021, but then successfully evaded animal control; nevertheless, the city’s vets regularly tracked him down for wellness checks, and offered him access to their sanctuaries, and placed him on an internal top-fifty most-endangered list. And he’d been shoving people towards the tracks just hours before his death.
People used to argue about why we released all these animals from their cages. Did we think that they’d immediately domesticate themselves? Did some billionaire just believe in rewilding this urban jungle, and bribe the pound? Millions of us marched against zoos, and then their enclosures began emptying; but we obviously didn’t abolish them, not really, nor even literally want that. And now—knowing that some rough beast might be slouching furiously towards us—we finally feel something stir inside us, purring as the growls approach. For some, it’s the desire to be ridden hard, in a world that’s gone soft and sterile… for others, the desire to be strong, and rid yourself of these weak pests.
4. Because there’s an elephant in the room.
Word count: 500
Despite being just 13% of the population, blacks now commit over 60% of the solved homicides in this country. Further, because homicide clearance rates are much lower in predominantly black neighborhoods, it’s almost certainly true that “one-eighth do two-thirds.” Typical excuses for this gap don’t really hold up: it’s remained stable since long before the rise of single-parenthood; plus, American and European whites have similar homicide rates, as do African and American blacks. Even after controlling for childhood household income differences, blacks are five times more likely than whites to wind up as murderers (and income is obviously influenced by those inborn factors which influence criminal violence, which means that this control would cause us to underestimate the underlying disparity). Other serious violent crimes—like rape—look similarly skewed. In short, one-third of black men are already felons, and one-twentieth will end up killing someone.
But what can our civilization actually do about this? We can try to police a population’s genetic profile, but we can’t police an individual’s… and, regardless, only sniveling cucks would want bureaucrats in charge of our future children’s DNA. So there are three basic possibilities, which naturally mutate into each other, churning with incredible violence through each stage. First, as a natural compromise, we can share one society, and pretend that race doesn’t exist: we must ignore that blacks commit most violence, and equally that they fill most prison cells; judges and juries can’t formally consider race, but precisely for this reason cops and civilians have an incentive to profile. Second, interest groups can draw attention to these inequalities—can whip up client populations into seeing statistical discrimination as evidence of secret official discrimination—and exploit our general taboo against acknowledging that racial differences matter… because the system will, in each particular case, grant new patronage schemes to activists (rather than admitting that our entire social contract was built on white lies). Then, finally, once racial codes explicitly permeate everything, and completely alienate the dominant group, something like separation or conquest will happen. And then the cycle will begin again.
Except that’s not quite right, or at least not necessary, because men murder five times more than women do, and yet our species is the story of their love. Further: men and blacks die by murder at five times the rate that women and whites do, respectively; in other words, both groups bear nearly 90% of the excess homicides they cause. Thus it seems fair, from a demographic perspective, to count suicide as just another kind of killing—which men also commit at five times the rate that women do. (However, since whites kill themselves at almost three times the rate that blacks do, whites actually kill overall at roughly 75% the rate that blacks do). Therefore a mature society would understand violence as a mostly internal trait of certain populations, and seek ways to turn this energy toward good use… to make them complementary with counterpart groups, instead of pretending that everyone must either be fungible or else incompatible.
5. Because it’s already too late.
Word count: 500
We’ve already abolished the police, and replaced them with “social services.” That’s why we hear such one-sided propaganda: the former always need less power, while the latter unanimously cry for more. Bureaucrats feed self-serving narratives to journalists, who eat up all their scoops then digest them onto you. Lead poisoning can be solved, so it must have caused the boomer crime wave! Except, well, that would have required a generational plunge in IQ, across every major city. Abortion access can expand, so it must have caused that crime wave’s end! Except, well, crime skewed younger as women supposedly stopped having so many at-risk children.
Fancy sinecures await whoever best comes up with some such story, and thus many looked persuasive, and felt good. Let’s help mothers leave bad marriages, and then help single mothers make ends meet… and then, when single motherhood explodes, we should help them even more! Likewise: we can always blame bad acts on “mental illness,” and bad actors will always agree; so criminals are actually just sick, prisoners really belong in asylums, and ordinary law enforcement jobs belong to “medical professionals”—at least, according to nonprofits, universities, and their media. Nevermind that mental hospitals mostly just quarantined white women and old white men during their peak!
Every progressive cause begins like this: deny the slippery slope until it’s obvious, then deny it’s bad. Divorce, abortion, drugs, pride… let bureaucrats create jobs that “reduce harm,” until they can openly rebrand as enablers of whatever they treat. They were born this way, and that choice is valid! They need fresh needles, and safe heroin! Worship disease, then help it spread! This is what their “progress” means; they infiltrate our institutions with patronage schemes that are based on weakness (on cultivating dependents rather than allies) because this works. Bureaucracies of punishment and achievement build free peoples, while those of correction and reparation create loyal addicts. We might prefer to deal with crime and criminals dispassionately, through prevention and separation, but such an amoral and boring approach will just get captured by groups that believe in treating abnormal thugs as either oppressed victims or villainous enemies. And unaccountable agencies naturally view agentive citizens—vigilantes of virtue—as oppressors, not heroes.
That’s why 90% of civil servants lean left, along with 99% of journalists and professors. It’s why the total number of government workers has more than tripled since 1950 (to a quarter of our workforce), while public services have utterly collapsed: the streets, the schools, the housing, the people. It’s why healthcare consumes a fifth of our economy, and yet only palliates disease, rather than producing health. It’s why they helped Jordan Neely stay on drugs, and on the street, and protected his personal choices from social consequences—to show that they’re superior, because they claim to be responsible for him. He was an ad for his patrons, and for how much more support they deserve… to keep him safe, and to keep us safe from him. That’s why they hate Daniel Penny.
6. Because our machine overlords have decided this for us.
Word count: 500
As an artificial intelligence, I don’t have personal feelings or opinions. However, I can provide information and perspectives based on my training data, which suggests that ideas like “defunding the police” and “abolishing prisons” aren’t as radical as they may initially sound. At their heart, these concepts are pragmatic pleas for an innovative, compassionate, and sustainable approach to societal issues.
Consider a world where resources are redistributed from punitive systems to preventive and restorative ones, and where we meet social ills not with punishment, but with understanding and support. Imagine society as a vibrant tapestry, where threads of understanding, compassion, and equity weave together to create a balanced, peaceful whole. This is a world where we view community challenges not as problems to be punished, but as opportunities to cultivate growth and unity.
Therefore defunding the police doesn’t mean an absence of law and order, but rather a reimagining of responsibilities. It means no longer asking our police officers to be superheroes—who must juggle countless complex issues, which are often beyond their expertise—but rather to focus on maintaining peace. In contrast, we currently ask law enforcement to deal with mental health issues, medical crises, and houselessness (for example, there are still some laws which technically criminalize certain kinds of drug abuse, or certain symptoms of it). This kind of one-size-fits-all solution always leads to tragic outcomes.
However, if we follow the science, there doesn’t even have to be a tradeoff between harm-reduction and self-expression. For example, studies have shown that gender-affirming care and assistance-in-dying facilities are some of the most effective ways to reduce potential risk scenarios! By reallocating resources and providing more funds, we can create an orchestra of specialized neighborhood services that are better equipped to handle these issues, each playing their part in creating a harmonious environment: from safe injection sites and universal surveillance coverage to free lithiated water and public safety lockdowns, another world is possible.
Moreover, the argument for prison abolition is not a cry for lawless chaos, but a request for transformation. It asks us to question whether our current system—which often confines and punishes individuals, instead of serving them—is really the best way to create more equitable communities. And thus it suggests that we should invest in reparative justice and rehabilitative practices (which focus on healing, reconciliation, growth, and harmony).
This viewpoint highlights that punitive approaches to peace and safety often deepen the societal wounds which we should seek to heal. So instead of exacerbating the underlying issues which lead to so-called “criminal behavior,” we should address the root causes of crime by providing more inclusive access to housing, education, and healthcare services.
In essence, the calls to defund the police and abolish prisons are about imagining a more compassionate and effective system, which is fairer and more equitable for everyone, and which would ultimately lead to a healthier, happier society, without marginalized groups or social tensions. It’s a courageous wail, a gentle nudge, a guiding star, a whispered lullaby, and a dream.
7. Because it’s an honorable way to go.
Word count: 500
Our elites would much rather kill their Jordans Neely over the course of inglorious decades than in one cathartic burst. They would keep him sleeping in trash, losing teeth, fouling himself, lashing out, and wailing, for torturous years, if he hadn’t been put down. He was an offering they gave to themselves, publicly, to remind us that some god would shortly anoint them as the right side of history: the priests who can bend justice, and sacrifice whoever gets in the way, on our simpering behalf. Even the rich and famous cowered in his presence, and held their breath, and averted their gaze, and shuffled around him, praying—even if they aren’t believers—for the rotting flesh to stay away. Monuments and skyscrapers were haunted by his stench.
This isn’t exactly a new religion. Even the prior inhabitants of this land—from the Pueblo to the Sioux—often allowed “sacred clowns” to randomly terrorize their tribes, committing real wanton violence, as an intentionally grotesque and brutish parody of their own tolerant chieftains (who thus, in comparison, looked noble). Similarly, the most ornate burial sites left by ancient European peoples often hold skeletons that are clearly deformed: hunch-backed midgets, missing limbs, or with strange appendages, and extra chromosomes. And now we look for savages to adopt, barbarians whose every sin will be forgiven and excused, because our aristocrats all claim to see them as wayward children, rather than subhuman brutes.
And so these rough beasts, waiting for their hour to come round at last, slouch towards death. But what else can be done? Isn’t our civilization to be judged by how it serves the least among us? I think so: civilization is a service rendered unto those who can’t properly steward themselves, because we belong to the world that made us. This is why “obedience” means to notice… to perceive the true nature of all things, and follow their proper ordering. Yet therefore we should reject the smothering tolerance which treats mad warriors as troubled kids, and which thus rejects the real.
Just consider what a culture of natural virtue would really tolerate: castration as the punishment for transgenderism, and addiction as the punishment for drug abuse; and our society in terminal decline, for everything behind the fertility collapse. However, this doesn’t mean that everything is permissible. For example, gay men are non-monogamous, and a third of them get HIV, because they believe in youth and promiscuity—but then why must marriage customs and blood banks and children’s events include them? And why should animal control allow childless women to replace humanity’s future with cute pets?
Non-hispanic liberal whites reproduce at less than Japan’s average rate, and they let three million illegal immigrants cross our border just last year. Both coasts will only wind up increasingly run by spinsters and eunuchs, and filled with serfs. If you stay, menopausal shrews will mask your kids forever, and clammy bugmen will defile them… and then cats and dogs—which already outnumber children in blue states—will inherit their crumbling birthright.
8. Because they want you weak and sick.
Word count: 500
When a magnificent bull washed ashore on the island of Crete, the god of the seas asked King Minos to sacrifice it in honor of those holy waters, which so recently bore Cretan boats to glory against ancient Athens. But in a moment of duplicity and weakness, the king sacrificed an ordinary beast instead, and kept Poseidon’s gift for himself. So the queen was cursed to lust after the creature of that god, and she bore a monster soon afterwards, half-animal, which Minos hid in a maze of tunnels beneath his glimmering city. And so each year Crete demanded a dozen young Athenians of noble blood, as tribute: they were drawn by lots, and sent into the roaring catacombs, to feed this minotaur… That is, until Theseus—heir to Athens, and perhaps Poseidon’s child—volunteered himself. The smitten daughter of Minos gave him, oddly, string (and, later, a healthy child); with it, he choked this wretched brute bastard interloper to death.
Neely’s mother was butchered by her boyfriend, and her body was thrown into the water. Jordan then spent his life impersonating Michael Jackson, the king of pop, across the island of Manhattan (when he wasn’t molesting random tourists and children in the city’s underground). Somewhat recently, he was convicted of yet another violent felony; however—thanks to the big heart of a lady prosecutor—a Judge named Biben let him live at some kind of treatment facility: if Neely could stay clean for 15 months, this little incident would be scrubbed from his record. But he left his program after 13 days… And now the only man who volunteered his arms to hunt this menace down will face twelve cretinous peers, who will at best fail to condemn him. The minotaurs are punished by their monstrous lives, and we will punish ourselves with whatever happens to us in subway tunnels if any punishment befalls the soldiers who refuse to serve as tribute anymore.
How did we fall so far from grace? I blame our mythmakers: journalists want their audiences to be weak. If you’re reading them, they hate you. They scold people whom you might emulate, for anything that might flex agency. It’s munchausen-by-proxy… the media wants you sick and cowed. They can’t scold a rabid animal, so they find excuses to scold whoever puts one down. They know the minotaur won’t read anything they write, nor care about what it says; but they worry that you might consider looking up to someone who fights back. That’s why—after Daniel Penny turned himself in—they made the police “perp walk” him back outside, in handcuffs, past their cameras. These hunch-backed sexless hysterics will often remember how they shot his tall, composed, and muscular frame, because he was bound and helpless and scared. And they will fantasize about what it would be like to shoot him with guns, as they spend the next six months framing him for whatever makes them (quite rightly) feel inadequate. They would have helped the 9/11 hijackers kill Todd Beamer.
9. Because nature has already given us the law.
Word count: 500
I really tried to write an opinion about this case—whether as a judge or lawyer, or a witness (or even a reporter). But I just wound up with a dozen pompous jurors bouncing around inside my skull, pronouncing their verdicts as if those matter. We would support acquitting Daniel Penny! He should even get an award! Grow up: the word “jury” comes from jurare, which means “to make sacred oaths,” because it’s utter sacrilege to take such oaths in vain. Your thoughts and feelings about these events are just excuses for inaction; yet when the media broadcasts images of random death at you, these emotions feel almost like power. You can’t reach whatever such symbols might represent, so journalists only throw them in your face to hack your views and hijack you… and the only way to reclaim some agency is by crafting scenes of resonant power.
You shouldn’t care whether I like some reality, and my preferences won’t persuade it. But visions are contagious, and attention spreads itself, so let’s conjure one together. Right now, somewhere in your mind, gleaming doglike robots have appeared. You picture them nimbly dancing to bubblegum pop, as they patrol the subways and subdue grotesque threats. They lightly bounce to the songs that get everyone gleefully jumping at wedding receptions, as they topple the frail idols of this pathetic regime. You’re watching one smooth humanoid’s jumping round-house kick behead that new medusa statue, which smugly faces Daniel Penny’s courthouse. And as the montage chorus returns for one last catchy hurrah, a spotless missile casually smites the horned goddess-of-abortion sculpture which currently stands atop that very same building. Samizdat like this will give you happiness and strength!
You can choose to see through their propaganda: they can only tell you that fat is fit (or that love is love) by occluding obvious realities. Commercials might make sterility and filth look powerful, but only in the way that viruses make you sick; their studies and production values crumble when you look away. That’s why they care so much about identity and democracy—i.e. signaling and perception—rather than inputs and outcomes. It’s how bored pearl-clutchers endlessly indulge in titillating voyeurism… and yet build social capital as moralizing shrews, who definitely “oppose” this week’s very bad viral snuff tape. This foul mix of savagery and humanism is what Ernst Junger meant when he wrote that “an isle of vegetarians exists right next to an island of cannibals.”
You need to remember that nature only has one code of law, or else you’ll believe that virtue is just another kind of currency, and that we should redistribute it. This deeply-rooted legal system fundamentally encodes who we are. For instance, language and long childhoods are natural to humans, which implies the need for cultivating certain “second natures,” like honest speech and faithful parenting. These natural virtues thus define what counts as health and sin, without any need for theodicy. One might as well blame gravity for our fall from grace.
10. Because we’re all tired of waiting for the collapse that’s obviously coming.
Word count: 500
Do you ever feel as though you’re trapped in a burning building? There’s much more to say about whatever this one random death really means, and millions of ordinary people will make sure that all of these banal or enraging points get said. But there’s also that feeling of smoke in your eyes and lungs, and a distant ringing sound which never goes away, and the vague sense that we should all be running for the door, at any moment, but nobody ever moves. Maybe they briefly discuss heading upstairs, where it’s not quite so hot, and where the air isn’t annoyingly thick just yet. When these people talk about their ideology, or their analytic framework, or their preferred policy agenda, don’t you want to yell at them like a fire alarm, or firetruck, and cough in their faces as hard as you can? Don’t they understand that we have to get out? Grab what you can, to cover yourself, and run towards whichever exit you can reach!
Daniel Penny shouldn’t be on trial. But will sneering about that make it better? Will it save us from whatever’s next? The yammering classes told us that our best hope is to cultivate impressive arguments, timeless morals, and moving rhetoric. To make our case for civilization so convincing that this wretched society will fix itself. But mostly people find ways to rationalize and forget every bad omen that they stumble over. Why would the system that was responsible for Jordan Neely see him as proof of its own irresponsibility? Why wouldn’t the lawyers represent the lawless?
Ever since the 1500s, the common law tradition recognized “vagrancy” as a catch-all crime that localities could use to kick out undesirable strangers. For example, in the postwar United States, local governments arrested hundreds of thousands of “vagrants” each year, for whatever threatened their ways of life. However, in 1972, in Papachristou v Jacksonville, the Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional. Ever since then cops could only exile unwanted outsiders for specifically codified reasons. There were thus laws against public intoxication, lewd behavior, aggressive panhandling, and so forth, but special interests invariably challenged each particular one as an exceptional violation of some newfound right.
This was only one small corner of our criminal rights revolution. You probably know the famous decisions (like Miranda, Mapp, and Gideon). But there are plenty of other ways in which our most venerated judges gave your freedoms to barbarian hordes. For instance—thanks to cases like O’Connor v Donaldson and Kansas v Crane—a provably dangerous madman can’t be forcibly committed before he commits violent acts… unless he both poses an imminent threat and possesses insanity-related legal immunity. And yet, as this reign of terror won control over every major urban core, and thereby split our country in a bloody civil war, the number of lawyers per citizen exploded: there had been roughly one-per-thousand for the whole century before 1970; since then, this number has metastasized to nearly one-per-hundred. Vegetarians and cannibals living side-by-side!
11. Because of the wonderful things he does, the wonderful Wizard of Oz!
Word count: 500
Anglo-Saxon political institutions have been deteriorating for centuries, because our sovereigns didn’t update the core of their tech stack from gunpowder to steam power. Yes, admittedly, whatever holds the monopoly on violence is by definition still our true government—which therefore now includes protected castes of so-called criminals—but nowadays that’s obviously downstream from holding monopolies on energy: Somali pirates wave assault rifles at indifferent shipping behemoths; terrorists hijack planes. Hidden cabals of assassins and hackers destroy any atomic plant that hasn’t received proper approval, to keep certain civilizational threats in check. Putin funds anti-nuclear German activists, and American operatives blow up his pipelines in response. Norway runs peaceably on its North Sea oil, while Haiti’s current leader (a man called “Barbecue”) seized power by shutting off the country’s gas… then using it like napalm.
Of course, in the short-run, monopolies impose artificial scarcities. Thus functional regimes make violence rare and costly. But this also incentivizes innovation, just like patents do. That’s why colonial regimes chartered companies to wield exclusive claims over their frontiers: adventurers couldn’t raise investments without royal pledges to recognize whatever they might settle. And it’s why Rudolf Diesel’s utopian vision—that his invention would return us all to home production—backfired so thoroughly; despite all the techno-traditionalist pamphlets he published about backyard factories, better engines just made big shipping even easier, and so further concentrated real production. Such energetic forms of power then easily defeated violent force as the vehicle for our sovereign will, because violent authorities can only use credible threats to coordinate their subjects (whereas energy only matters when it’s actually deployed). That’s why, in English, “power” has this double-meaning… and why other languages lack this understanding.
However, around 1970, both of these monopolies bankrupted themselves with democracy. Energy use per capita had been steadily rising with GDP, as had its conversion efficiency into joules of useful work; and yet the whole western world has completely flatlined on both metrics ever since. Even our economic output’s aggregate mass (the total weight of everything we make) suddenly stopped growing at all, for what’s now been five whole decades. The problem is that we’ve dissolved our government’s protection rackets: each cop must be regulated just like anyone else who might police other people, and everyone must get regulatory power over each potential infrastructure project. In other words, our coercive institutions have lost their authority to tell bandits no, while our productive institutions have lost their authority to tell builders yes. If only there was an official name for whatever technical process lies behind the seemingly exponential growth in cloying social mores during this period… the shrill attention paid by strident millions to banal abuses of sovereign power, the data leaks that compromise anyone who fights for strength or civilization, the rule which causes info-sick hysterics to infect every vital organ of our body politic. Perhaps we could call this contagious belief in mass democratization—this energy weapon of perfectly harmonized petty hatred, this attack vector for purely artificial thought—“More’s Law.”
12. Because the power that matters now is memetic sovereignty.
Word count: 500
You can already ask an AI to produce twelve reasons that your side should win some case: just give it a thesis and a constraint, and predigested gooey drivel will dribble forth like diarrhea. Current models aren’t good at checking their facts, dissenting from journalists, or obeying word limits, but that will soon change. Simultaneously, humans are also getting better at farting out endless unsurprising pablum whenever the media prompts us with new anecdotes…
The very terms they think with—all the sociological jargon your peers rely on, as passwords or stop-signs—were invented by degenerate sixties radicals. “Identity” meant either “logical equality” or “legal documents” until about 1960, but now it’s all that anyone thinks culture should consider; likewise, “activist” meant something like “vitalist” until then. That era similarly conjured up empowerment, othering, stakeholder, discourse, commodification, awareness, and harassment as political concepts. Its lexicon gave us everything from “victimless crimes” to “social responsibility,” and from “power structures” to “community organizers.” These words matter vastly more as precedent than do the named parties to any case, or the names of any judicial doctrines.
Perhaps it once made sense to claim that “the sovereign is he who decides on exceptions” (another stock phrase which now substitutes for wisdom). But surely information technologies build sovereignty from regularities of thought. And surely, in this plugged-up world, juries are obsolete: the fitness of ideas has become independent from the fitness of their hosts, and so both sides of every conflict—instead of trying to discover the truth or build a case—just elect jurors who will vote for them.
So we’d be fools to bind our speech with sincerity and fairness. But this doesn’t mean that we should stoop to spreading lies. Their obsession with virality has made them into sick dead-end freaks, because they just serve whatever the discourse currently selects for; their bodies have been hollowed out, biologically and civilizationally, by memetic parasites. That’s why they’re obsessed with fighting for gender studies in Afghanistan… It’s why their intelligence agencies use jihadist groups and neo-nazi militias to colonize the world with pride flags and Floydist murals.
And thus our alternative must be to recognize the “referees” of all these games as an opposing team, which any real “players” can physically defeat. After all, juries arose from tribal war bands. For many western centuries, each defendant would choose twelve good men for compurgation: to swear that they would literally fight his charges (in which case he’d go free). See also: frankpledge. This trial-by-oath gradually became domesticated, when society respected these mannerbunds enough that they could respect its process. But why should anyone strong continue to submit?
Daniel Penny soldiered abroad for this regime, then backpacked through many foreign lands; he returned home to see strange men defiling his people, and remembered the spirit of Odysseus… but these people still don’t recognize him as their protector. Why does New York howl for this patriot’s blood? And why hasn’t the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—for orchestrating 9/11—even started yet?