Marc "ACAB" Godin on Nostr: Okay, here's a thought, inspired by a great thread where people were suggesting ...

Okay, here's a thought, inspired by a great thread where people were suggesting "jobs" or "roles" we'd need in the utopia, and the list-starter asked as an open question "what about the law-keepers, how does this society handle troublemakers"?

Good question, but I guess for me I think that issue is partly entwined with the idea of "jobs" in the first place. I wonder if maybe only a very few of us are called to specialize and maybe a more free society wouldn't have us be specialists, but generalists, each with a more or less robust sphere of interests and skills and callings that we just *do*.

When a person is hurt or sick, enough of us would be interested enough in healing to heal them. We wouldn't have "doctors", we'd have a community of people who work in healing (and those people also do other things outside of healing). The community would still build, share, and record knowledge, but instead of doing that in private away from public eyes, health care is participatory, where anyone learns to fix and clean a bandage, and some folks who are good at it and with passion or with need learn surgery or epidemiology or whatever.

Same for law and order...there wouldn't be a special class of people who's responsibility is solely and singularly violence and control. We'd solve problems of violence the way we solve other problems - with participation from the community, from the stake-holders, specific to the situation and community that it happened. This is hard to explain to an authoritarian, who needs a person or a symbol to hold absolute authority, but we solve violence like this all the time. I've broken up arguments, I've broken up fights - it was always a community that did that. I had people beside me also intervening to calm down the parties. I've *been* calmed down.

But I couldn't describe to you the "rules" my friends and bystanders followed to de-escalate. We did it because we were in community with each other. There wasn't a "cop" in our friend-group or club who could bust the door down and beat up whoever they thought was the problem.

So, I think in a fair and just society justice would be distributed, the responsibility for keeping peace would be distributed. When a problem happens, when harm is done, the people involved and around it will figure it out, write down or record what they did and how it turned out, and people will learn in case something similar happens in the future or in a neighbouring community.

This isn't a hard and fast idea, I'm not suggesting it, I'm not interested in finding it's flaws just now. I'm more interested in thinking about how this sort of thing could be done. I think it would look absolutely different everywhere you go, and I think it might have outcomes even I wouldn't like or be comfortable with, but I'm not comfortable with cops and prisons, either.

Anyway, if anyone wants to know what I think would happen to violent criminals, it's "that would depend on the community where the violence happened, and on the victims, and on the people who share community with the victims and the violent person" and sometimes I, personally, might not like the answer a particular community comes up with, but to me that is a risk I'd take.