Killing Your Liberties – What Would Happen If There Were No Laws And Rules? (Hate crimes increase by orders of magnitude, with nobody bothering to stop lynch mobs from going on witch hunts.)
What would happen if there were no laws? I believe the human conscience can help a law-abiding citizen remain lawful with or without the laws.
At first, total anarchy. People are made aware that no laws exist. All major highways quickly fill with crashes because a small minority of idiots go fast or in the wrong lane or both. Since, presumably, police have stopped policing, except for perhaps a few renegades who simply enact vigilante justice on anyone they disagree with, the crazies start running the asylum within hours. Hate crimes increase by orders of magnitude, with nobody bothering to stop lynch mobs from going on witch hunts.
Corporations are initially hit quite badly (more on this later), with people looting and overwhelming their mostly deterrent-based security. Because people are not generally psychos, even armed security does not generally shoot looters.
Currency quickly begins to undergo hyperinflation, as do things like precious metals. Weapons sales increase considerably, seeing as now all civilians, for the time being, must rely on their own means or their connections for self-defense, instead of relying on the legal system.
The existing vestiges of interpersonal power, namely, large corporations that produce a necessary good, criminal gangs, remnants of the police force, possibly churches or mosques or synogogues, and neighborhood watches quickly, within weeks to months, become the most powerful organizations in their respective territory. Free to shoot anyone who doesn’t agree, or simply withhold from them resources that they need, the monopolistic and collusive organizations quickly gather territory and start punishing people who violate their unwritten or written rules. Those in rural areas find themselves cut off from supplies and in danger of falling victim to criminal gangs, extremist groups, and new military forces alike, with their local defensive abilities bring far overwhelmed by their attacker’s capabilities. Local law becomes quite strict. If I had to guess, religious rural areas would tend to form heavily religious local laws, but more focused on defense, securing resources, and group cohesion, than on truly religious matters. Religious extremists would also play into the mix, likely forming their own proto-state similar to the Islamic State in Iraq and a Syria, but perhaps not quite as large or as bad.
Overall, we’d go from liberty to rugged individualism to factional and sectarian totalitarianism fairly quickly.
Some people might attempt to re-form the previous state. Others might go for the state of their dreams, and still others might just do whatever they can to maintain power and stability in their new state. There would be a good many people who decide to “bug out” upon the government abolishing itself and society collapsing. Some such people would be well-prepared survivalists with a bunker in the wilderness stocked with food, weapons, medicine, etc. Others would just bring a hiking tent and whatever groceries they could carry on foot or on bike to a remote area. Highways may become a problem because traffic could back up hundreds of kilometers from anywhere habitable, potentially leading to mass starvation on highways without car-traversible roads. The logic of bugging out is questionable. On the one hand, someone with years worth of food and a large group with them going off to a secluded bunker might be better off than the medium-sized towns. On the other hand. A small group can be easily overwhelmed by criminal gangs and pillaging armies, often being murdered or starving as a result. This was best seen in Argentina’s economic collapse of 2001, where after society had recovered, the government had found rural survivalists dead in their bunkers, their supplies looted and their defenses overwhelmed by criminal gangs.
Big cities would face another problem. There is simply no way for dense urban cores to get enough food without imports. As freeways, harbors, airports, and possibly even railways would likely be not operational, and emergency relief organizations would be overwhelmed and underfunded, because nobody would be paying taxes and money couldn’t buy much anyway, as well as because a lot of people would stop working and focus on their own survival, and because the sheer scale would be too enormous to control, starvation would be a real problem in city cores once stored food had been exhausted.
Individual farmers would suffer as well, with much of their crop likely being pillaged by new governments and criminal gangs to feed their subjects or sell/barter for exorbitant prices.
However, large farming corporations would probably be able to hire good security, and so could largely just ramp up prices. They could try to collude with power plant owners and factory owners to form a new state, or simply become the agro-industrial complex of other formative states.
Overall, law and order would eventually return, though likely not in exactly the same form. There is a notion of originalism, which basically states that after the instability would come a reboot of the original state or one with similar goals, or goals desirable to the people.
On the other hand instability has also in the past resulted in significant rethinking of the state. The US for example might see a leftwing West coast socialist democracy arise, or a reactionary southern feudalist theocracy with family and small town values as the cornerstone of government. Chances are that any new state would offer a vacant promise that the lawless times would never occur again, and blame ideological dissenters for causing the problem, instead of an arbitrary ruling that laws shall be eliminated. Any new state would probably be heavily focused on defense, expansion (reclaiming their rightful homeland) and agrarian living for at least a few years, so it’s unlikely that first world service economies would arise within that time or that states focused on economic liberty would arise either.actually, it’s pretty likely that even a new state that preaches rugged individualism would be more collectivist and have higher taxes than the current US, or most western democracies.
Overall, you’d like see most states trying to imitate their former country for legitimacy, even if they share little in common besides borders. This is a lot like how, Russia, France, Italy, the Papal states, the Holy a Roman empire, Byzantium, and probably others, all claimed to be the true heir to the Roman empire, despite being only vaguely descended from it, if at all.
Most-likely, the country would resurface as multiple smaller authoritarian states vying for power.
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