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RE: Authoritarianism as Security Blanket
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.
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.