A Brief Note on The Monopoly of Violence of the State

In the above discussion on the one hand Sargon effectively argues that the near absolute monopoly of violence in totalitarian societies by the state is what makes the use of violence by the state legitimate on the other hand The Britisher argues that once one begins to get creative in the way that one murders people then that entity cannot claim to be firmly grounded in sanity. To put it more plainly Sargon argues that when the dictator uses violence and torture to maintain order that is what lends him the authority in the eyes of the people to wield that violence while The Britisher argues that after a certain level of cruelty has been reached it cannot be argued that the state is instituiting violence merely for the rational motive to maintain its power but that there is something more perverse, insane and irrational at play that cannot be fully accounted for by the need for state instituted violence in an ordinary dictatorship.

The Britisher is parlty correct but the bar for the amount of violence necessary to qualify as insane varies from very low purges to kill off the opposition to full blown casual mass murder (e.g. free one way train trips to Siberia) to the selective creative torture of dissidents and random people (e.g. free helicopter rides in Pinochet's Argentina). It all depends on context. Take for example the current posterboy for extraordinary dictatorships, North Korea, what would happen if they stopped torturing people and developing nuclear weapons? Exactly, the whole thing would collapse into anarchy and the leaders would at best (for them) get shot. Rationally speaking therefore the leader of north korea must maintain a certain level of violence and should arm himself with unconventional weapons that is if he wants to survive which I am taking for granted. If he goes too below or too high above this neccessary level of violence then the legitimacy of his monopoly of violence will slip from his grip and with that the monopoly of violence, i.e. power, will also slip from his hands and soon enough he will turn up dead.

Instead of leaving it there as some sort of Machiavellianism 101 for noobs and idiotically innocent people I thought it would be worth to end it on a note on the legitimacy of the use of violence in the democratic Liberal state for the anarchist capitalist and the idiotically innocent. Basically, there is no alternative, someone will gain a monopoly of power over a certain nation and a nation without a centralized authority will become part of an empire of another centralized authority. If you are going to end with a small group with a monopoly of violence anyway then the Liberal democratic state (e.g. limited government, freedom of religion etc..)is the safest bet that it won't devolve into a dictatorship or part of an empire with no representation (or in other words, America fuck yeah!).