Unfortunately, when governments give up, they don’t go away, leaving us in an an-cap utopia; they shift their focus from attempting to manage crime and delinquency to “managing” the people who aren’t really a problem, but who are nevertheless manageable. There is a name for all this: anarcho-tyranny. At the present time, this is the dystopian scenario that worries me the most: not anarchy outright, or social collapse, or economic collapse, or even civil war, but the tolerance of lawlessness coupled with the selective use of the police and the courts and the regulatory apparatus to hold only some citizens accountable while others are tolerated as they run riot.
Outright anarchy would be preferable (at least to me) to anarcho-tyranny. In a state of outright anarchy, it is the Hobbesian war of all-against-all in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But at least you have carte blanche to protect yourself. Under a regime of anarcho-tyranny, you have to stand by as crimes are committed, including crimes against your property or against your person, but if you defend yourself, the police who have been passively standing by as you have been victimized, will be mobilized to arrest and prosecute you for defending yourself.
To be clear this is not a new concern. It's as old as every big city with large gangs or an organized crime presence, which in poorer neighborhoods constituted virtually a robber-baron sub-state beneath the official state. An immigrant struggling to run a small business in the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth centuries who had to turn over half his business's profits for "protection" was intimately familiar with anarcho-tyranny. In those times it was a result of political corruption: big city "machine" politics and police who were the machine's bully boys, at times little better than the biggest and best armed gang in town. Bribery took care of much law enforcement; for the remainder, the criminal class swiftly learned how to game the system. Like malaria parasites that continually evade the body's immune system, criminals learned how to take full advantage of their right as citizens to be considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, while using a large repertoire of underhanded dirty tricks. If a shopkeeper who refused to pay tribute had his business firebombed in the middle of the night by "person or persons unknown", plausible deniability protected the criminals even when anyone who was not blind, deaf and retarded knew who was responsible. Small time crooks might get sacrificed to the law as scapegoats, serving as ablative shielding for the big names who ran things behind the scenes. The swiftness of criminal terrorism versus the slowness of the wheels of justice, and often the perception that to even try to seek justice was futile, dissuaded many of the victims of crime from even resisting. At times it seemed like the law was not merely useless but the criminals' accomplice, in that resorting to counter-violence in self-defense was far harder to get away with than professional extortion, assault, robbery and murder. The final insult added to injury were laws broadly forbidding the public carry of firearms in an effort to "crack down on crime". It was this environment that spawned the pulp era fiction of secret crusaders who fought crime and defended the innocent, culminating in the character of Batman, the ultimate super-vigilante.
Today the situation is somewhat different in that big city government is less corrupt than it is often decadent. Politically unable or ideologically unwilling to crack down on crime, the modern nanny state emulates the parent or teacher who equally punishes the bully and the victim for "fighting". Fighting back it seems is considered a worse offense than the original criminal attack, as self-defense categorized as "vigilantism" is regarded as a challenge to the (often abrogated) role of the state to enforce law. So in such circumstances, what practical advice is out there for the average citizen seeking to protect themselves? Certainly knowing self-defense laws to the letter and practicing them to the fullest extent of the law is a start; anything else?
Some Internet searching on surviving anarcho-tyranny turned up the following: "The Hunt for Whitey: Recognizing and Surviving the Condition of Anarcho-Tyranny Paperback – April 27, 2017 by James LaFond". I was wondering if anyone here was familiar enough with it to say if it was worth purchasing. Or if there is any other literature on the subject out there. ETA: Amazon's preview of the book made it sound more like ranting about the problem than actually proposing what can be done about it.
