RE: Authoritarianism as Security Blanket
Though I agree with what you've said here, I'll relay some arguments I've heard over the years to get your thoughts.
if there were no ruling class, bad people would sometimes still decide to do bad things. Just like they do now.
But would it be worse? That's the fear side of things I see. Pragmatic thinkers I know are convinced "bad things" would increase without government. They want to see evidence and proof this isn't the case. They want to see it working somewhere before they advocate for it.
The implication is that if all cops, soldiers, bureaucrats and politics vanished today, it wouldn’t occur to anyone else to try to defend themselves from thieves and thugs, or to try to create any sort of deterrent to those who would victimize the innocent.
Some argue the result of this would just be "government." I get that we use a different definition of government than they do (a monopoly on the use of force within a geographic region), but I think there's a deeper problem than that. Again, they want to see voluntary solutions working on a large scale (like in cities with millions of people packed together in a small place) before they will agree removing government is a good idea and effective solutions do exist which don't require violence. How can we show these pragmatic thinkers who desire empirical evidence that our ideas and philosophy actually lead to a better world?
Edit: and I'm also familiar with the "But who will pick the cotton?" response. For some people, that's unconvincing.
In the 20th century alone, over 100 million people were killed by democide. These are real people with real families and real friends. Are we going to ignore those millions of people that governments have killed because "we just need the right people in charge"? Or are we going to say that perhaps the system is the problem?
Considering the mountains of bodies governments have piled up, the burden of proof should fall on the state, and I think we just need to convince them of that.
I've used the democide argument again and again, but it often falls on deaf ears, unfortunately. I guess they assume things like that would still happen without government or maybe something worse? I dunno. Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angles of Our Nature, argues for the Hobbesian Leviathan using deaths per 100k as a metric, but others critique his work to say his "anarchist" societies were nothing but. I recently read The Origins of Virtue and I think that makes a better argument that government does just break everything it touches.