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.

Ah, the weekly post with this title.

“Congress could legalize weed!” Yeah, but it don’t.

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.

In reality, the difference between objective law enforcement based on rule of law and anarchy in a small community is demonstrated by lynch mobs. It’s lovely to think that people don’t need someone like a local law enforcement officer, but someone with legal authority to counter mob mentality is for the benefit of the accused. Mobs don’t care about evidence or the law or circumstances. Localized collective violence is the term.

I’ve seen this a couple times around Africa. Zambia’s “flying coffin” is an ideomotor effect where sometime gets killed because “the body points to who killed them.”

Plenty of examples. Women accused of witchcraft. Lynchings. Necklacing. If you search for the word mob and “burned alive” you’ll find examples from every continent of localized collective violence.

Intentional communities aren’t immune from this.

In fact, I had an in-law that had to leave an intentional community they lived in for decades because no one was willing to address a member that was sexually abusing children. The collective violence was being unwilling to act.