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How would a Solarpunk society handle law enforcement and military? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/solarpunk@slrpnk.net
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I mean, let's be honest: People do crimes even when they have no material need to do so, so you will always need some form of law enforcement, how should a solarpunk society handle this?

The same is true for a military: As long as there is no world peace or some magical way to shut the outside world out, and as long as other societies exist somewhere nearby (and in today's world this means somewhere on the same planet), a society needs the means to defend itself... what would this look like?

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[–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Literally all of human history is littered with examples of localized collective violence. Its a fairly well-studied topic.

Your meme paste is hopeful, sure. But you seem to speak from an obvious lack of experience of small community living. It takes a lot of work to keep a community going. Many intentional communities fail once a cluster of leaders age out of leadership.

I'm just asking you to accept that reality is real, messy, and complex. None of this should be shocking unless you're just fantasizing about this.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    Police riot. Trump and ICE are the institutionalization of the lynch mob. If government disappears, everything will not be just fine. People can be unreliable. The police and government are made of people. Governments fail, societies collapse. Solarpunk is a movement to adapt communities so that when government fails again, the harm can be mitigated.

    The lynch mobs you're referring to didn't happen in spite of government, but with tacit approval of government at some level of administration. The people doing the lynching knew that they wouldn't be held accountable, and that they would be protected by the government from retaliation. They aren't examples of anarchy, they aren't typical of small communities.

    Lynch mobs typically are the result of unwritten laws being tacitly enforced by government.

    Small communities do have problems, so we should continue the collective discussion of how to best resolve those problems in ways that preserve justice. Bringing in the FBI to deal with the racist police who were leading lynch mobs only worked until the federal level was recaptured by a more virulent strain of white supremacy. 'Strange Fruit' didn't end because the FBI suddenly discovered injustice. It was a result of a long running grassroots community conversation about the problem until progress on alternative solutions showed enough success to become threatening to the supremacy of the federal government.

    Reality is real, messy, and complex, and doesn't get simpler by abdicating responsibility for that messy complexity to a class of people with even less accountability than ourselves. Communities fail, and often people with the imagination to think of creative alternative solutions and are doing the hard work of community building are the reason that they don't. Assuming we don't live in real, vibrant, complex worlds only telegraphs the simplicity of your own worldview.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago

    My friend, your comment really shows how much you're not understanding the problem. Abuses by a government are exactly why intentional communities exist. So then are those communities magic because they self-govern? Or course not. However, everything you mention is quite literally the opposite problem of what I'm talking about.

    You do raise a good point that someone enforcing the law needs to be objective and honorable and not some power-tripping human scrotum in a uniform.

    Not to get all "20th Century American Lit" here, but a powerful example of this was in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch sits and waits outside the jail, expecting a mob. He's there to uphold rule of law and defend rule of law, and his client, with his own life. The mob that arrives is local community members. It's only when those community members are named and de-anonymized, and therefore accountable for their actions as individuals, that they back down.

    While this is a fictional example, this is how humans work. Mobs can be small. Mobs can be HOAs and commune leadership groups and three car-fulls of some guys that show up. But they are mobs which use force outside of the law for reasons based on emotions and not evidence or justice. Whether that's 1 or 10 or 20,000 people, that's wrong. I'm talking about the times when it's 10 on 1, and which are numerous and occur daily. It's why LGBTQ+ kids are beaten to death in small towns and no one ever gets arrested. It's why lynchings happened, and haven't ever really fully stopped. And why my spouse's cousin was sexually abused as a child and the only option was to leave the community, because no one wanted to uphold the law. The effort cuts both ways.

    So, please, as much as you probably enjoy drawing an A in a circle on your notebooks, and being all edgy and calling yourself an anarchist, please understand that the point of having communities and rules is to keep people safe. People that act with that intention, can do so without abusing the circumstance, and, in fact, many many many communities manage to do this just fine every day, all over earth. That doesn't mean we should take it for granted, but rather that it takes work and it's work that's worth doing together.

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