Something occurred to me this morning while I was thinking about the last section of “to change everything” where there is a line about “the last crime”; the idea being that if there is no law, there can be no crime.
The immediate response is “well people will still do bad things” which may be true, but our response to that will be to each discrete act and not some universal abstract idea of “crime”.
This got me thinking about why it’s so hard for people to imagine a world without police. Police are our answer to crime, everything that we label as crime, and as long as crime exists, police exists, and as long as law exists, crime exists.
Then I realized that we do this all the time. Once something can be labeled , we work against the label, and if we erect institutions to work against the label, the label and everything it is used on will exist as long as the institution. Institutions have a tendency to self-perpetuate and defend their existence. They develop immune systems which often guarantee they can go on forever. By creating this relationship, we choose to perpetuate the very things we labeled in order to resolve or eliminate.
Perhaps worse is that in doing so we alienate ourselves individually from the people who we have labeled, and in turn any chance of resolving the problem on a person-to-person basis and at a human scale. Each interaction or conflict engages the entire institution, and the institutions interests and incentives rarely align with any of the people involved.
So the statement is not only logically true, but true in practice as well. Eliminate law and you will eliminate crime. Eliminate crime and we will solve all the things we used to call crime individually and more precisely with solutions that fit each individual situation instead of one deadly solution for everything.
