A Society Without Violence

I believe that violence will be like slavery. Before slavery was abolished there had been no example of a society who had lived without slaves, slaves made up a significant fraction of the economic system and basically everyone viewed slavery as a necessary evil of society. But then a small group of people began to think creatively and envisioned a society without slaves and through their hard work and some luck we now have a world where slavery is illegal everywhere.

Likewise, today there is no example of a society that has existed without institutionalised violence, violence is a major part of how society regulates itself, it is a significant item in the budget for every government and basically everyone views violence as a necessary evil of society. And just like slavery I believe institutionalised violence can be abolished.

In this context let’s define violence to be the use of physical force by someone to impose their will over another person. (Not a great definition but we need something to get this conversation started). Let’s also assume that threatening violence is also violence since for that threat to be effective long term it will need to be backed up by violence at some point. I’ll also mainly discussing institutionalised violence of the type that militaries, police and security personal use.

Everyone has the tendency for violence within ourselves and so most people think that the only way to eliminate violence in society is for every member of that society to become enlightened. And this would indeed work but its intractability has lead to the term ‘world peace’ to become a euphemism for something that is impossible.

I propose a different and more robust mechanism for removing violence from society. It is built around the idea that violence particularly if you include all of its negative externalities is incredibly inefficient and would be outcompeted by non-violent alternatives. The vast majority of exchanges today occur non-violently and the ones that do occur violently are incredibly expensive. Law suits use the government’s threat of violence to compel another party and are well known to be expensive. Militaries cost society significant fractions of their country’s GDP. Imprisoning people cost more than putting them into the Hilton hotel.

All of this is abstract, to anchor this discussion I will present a specific example. Consider a Homecube floating platform in international waters where each voxel is annually leased and receive utilities from adjacent voxels (voxel surveying, ocean infrastructure, Homecube, prerequisites for utopia). There is no public space instead people get around by paying to pass through privately owned commuting companies who lease voxels just like everyone else.

The basic pattern to resolving problems non-violently is to have all space privatised. Then when a crime occurs the lessee of the space stops trading with the violent criminal which will prevent their movement by excluding them from accessing voxels and give them motivation to comply by trading compliance for access to utilities such as air and water. Different voxel leasers can decide how long to exclude the criminal’s access to their goods and services.

Now given this setting let’s consider several situations where people think that no non-violent solution exists.

• Someone commits a petty crime such as theft of a $5000 laptop from a store.
  The store can just refuse entry to that person in the future. They might also pay for an independent judge to determine a verdict which other voxel owners such as stores or commuting companies can use as a basis to exclude that person from their services. Each voxel owner can decide on type and duration of the thief’s exclusion from their services. There are a number of non-violent ways to exclude someone from a commuting service. Automatic gates and doors can recognise them and chose not to open. A person could be paid to politely ask them to leave. A person could be paid to trail them ensuring nothing else is stolen. A person could be paid to play an annoying sound while trailing them which would function as a social stigma. When a person tries to buy any good or service they are denied. A common violent solution is for a person to be paid to be a bouncer and physically remove or prevent a person from entering the space. The bouncer solution is far more expensive mainly due to the huge negative externalities associated with the potential injury or death resulting from that violence.
• A nihilistic suicide shooter suddenly opens fire in a crowded commuting area.
  Because the commuting company (and every voxel) is privately owned they can chose to exile the shooter (or anyone else it wishes) from their voxel space. The commuting company will have the ability to quickly segment the space into multiple small voxel spaces essentially trapping the shooter. Once trapped the commuting company can chose to stop exchanging access to the utilities to the voxels where the shooter is located. Then trade will occur between the shooter and the commuting company where the shooter will receive access to utilities (such as clean air, water and food) and the commuting company will receive the disarmament of the shooter, compliance of the shooter to move to a different location, for the shooter to place handcuffs on themselves, etc. Because the shooter can use their free will to chose not to trade there is no violence occurring however if they don’t trade for utilities like fresh air or water they will die in a few days. It is recommended that the commuting company always provides the bare essentials necessary for the for the continuation of life and instead use less essential things for their negotiations.
  If the shooter does decide to comply then they will decide whether to be lead out to voxels that will accept people who have committed such a crime which is unlikely for something so serious or to a boat which has everything needed to survive indefinitely on the ocean and will automatically take the person 100km away from the platform at which point they can steer the boat in any direction they chose except back to the platform. For less serious crimes the criminal will be flown to a destination of their choice (a good practice is to charge everyone visiting the floating platform return ticket prices so that they can leave for free at any time). At some point judgement will occur to determine the duration of their exile. You might consider giving a criminal a nice boat or a free plane ticket to be too expensive however it is many orders of magnitude cheaper than having a highly armed SWAT constantly on standby and imprisoning the criminal for life.
• A military invasion by a foreign country.
  There are many solutions to this. But note that they often rely upon collective decision making which can be achieved through something like liquid democracy or futarchy.
  First would be to diplomatically negotiate with the country to resolve things peacefully.
  Second is to suggest to voxel lessees to not trade with the aggressive country.
  Third to move away from any territory that is being aggressive.
  Fourth to encourage lessees to evacuate the platform before the invasion.
  Fifth to lock down the platform to restrict the movement of the invading force and to non-violently prevent them from controlling access to the utilities or destroy the utilities. The destruction of utilities is not recommended.
  Sixth if the invasion is successful then encouraging voxel owners to either leave the platform or not trade with the invading force.
  Seventh the floating platform is sunk before the invasion is successful. This is not recommended because it would likely result in injury or death and will result in significant environmental pollution. It is also a technically difficult challenge which would rely on a complicated, fallible series of checks and balances to ensure that this isn’t maliciously or accidentially initiated. It is also not necessary because it would be cheaper to build a floating platform than to pay your military to capture one.
• Pirate raid
  If the pirate raid is just a few people with not very sophisticated weapons then the response would likely be similar to the nihilistic mass shooter situation. If the pirate raid has a large number of people with powerful weapons then the response would be similar to the invasion by a foreign military.
• Weapons of mass destruction
  Nuclear bombs, engineered pathogens and poisonous chemicals are some weapons that can cause mass destruction. If a foreign power is threatening a weapon of mass destruction then respond in a similar way to the military invasion scenario. If a nihilistic person or cult is developing a weapon of mass destruction in secret that is more difficult. The authoritarian response is to use force to remove trade and import/export privacy. Perhaps a focus on defence rather than prevention is the best non-violent way to respond to these threats. A nuclear bomb can only take out one platform so if the society functioned as a fleet rather than a monolithic structure then it would be more resilient. High performance air and water utility services will be able to effectively eliminate the spread of any air or water born pathogens or chemicals so that is unlikely to be a concern.
• Research into weapons that could cause human extinction
  Humanity is currently vulnerable to a super lethal and contagious engineered pathogen which could lead to our extinction. This research could take place unregulated on a floating platform. However, this vulnerable phase will likely be over by the time Homecube floating platforms are created (in part due to Homecube utility technology). Unregulated super intelligent rouge AI research could cause humanity to lose its agency. This will not be a problem initially because the development of the computer chips required for this type of AI research are located countries with regulations and so they can just chose not to trade those chips to unregulated floating platforms. By the time floating platforms are making cutting edge computer chips the uncertainty surrounding neural net AIs will be greatly reduced and so we will be in a much better situation to be able to devise and implement effective non-violent solutions to potential rouge AGI creation.

Part of the reason a non-violent society is possible is due to the absence of non-fungible intrinsic values. Countries today intrinsically value their territorial rights which is highly non-fungible whereas on a floating platform the really valuable thing are free and highly productive people being able to conduct free non-violent trade in extremely large volumes and frequencies. If an authoritarian force managed to capture a platform and all the people on it then the authoritarian force will have to constantly use inefficient violence to force trades. For example they will have to use force to prevent people from leaving the platform. They will have to use force to compel people who chose not to trade with them. They will have to use force to compel people to be productive when they go on strike or purposefully reduce productivity as an act of defiance.

It was taking seriously the teachings of Jesus about violence that lead me along this path. In Matthew 5:38–41 Jesus gives his first century listeners three examples of creatively finding a non-violent solution in common situations where violence is used against them that was neither submission nor violent retaliation. Jesus states the second greatest commandment is to ‘love others’ and encourages us to even ‘love our enemies’ and how can you love someone and commit violence against them? Also Jesus’s focus was almost entirely on the individual level. He didn’t lay any ground rules for governments. He spent a tiny fraction of his time talking about the institutions of church and marriage. I believe this is because Jesus’s perspective is that if an action is immoral for an individual then it is also immoral for an individual who is acting as a representative for a government. That is if it is wrong for someone to kill another then it is also wrong for an executioner or soldier acting on behalf of the state to kill someone. The first century Christians believed this but it was lost when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Today Christians water down these aspects of Jesus’s teachings because of a lack of imagination of how a society could function without violence and because the teaching of biblical inerrancy (which in my opinion is incorrect) results in certain passages in the Old Testament to be held in equal weight to the teachings of Jesus.

I believe the creative vision for a non-violent society which I described here is just one of many possible permutations. I have taken a particularly libertarian angle but if you do not resonate with that school of thought then please don’t write off this idea. Instead I would encourage you to think creatively about how you would structure a non-violent society if you were to start your own floating community.