I feel like I am strapping on a vest covered in steak and walking into the lion's den with this comment, but here goes nothing. ; )

Some people fear that these communities would eventually "go to war" against one another. This would not be the case if all communities had the nonaggression principle as the foundation of their own governance structure.

I think that hope is just as utopian and unrealistic as communists who "think that one day everyone will be selfless and work for the common good."

These different communities are likely separate because of some difference in fundamental views and values. But they still share the same space and resources (not the exact same land area of course, but they are all part of this interconnected and finite planet). Even if they remain tolerant of the (in their view obscene) behavior occurring in their neighboring community as long as it remains contained to that region, there will likely be situations where there is forced interaction between the two communities because of their need to access or manipulate shared resources. For example, they may both be pumping oil/gas out of the same shared reservoir. Or one community may be upstream the other community, and be consuming too much of the water or even polluting the downstream water that the other community relies on.

Perhaps this can be viewed as an act of aggression against their neighbor, but do you really think it is not a plausible for some communities to do these things if it benefits them (via higher profits, more convenience, greater access to resources, etc.) especially if they empathize with the impacted community less because of fundamental differences in values? I think it is very likely. And therefore the likely result would be that each community builds up militaries to defend their access to resources, and occasionally those communities will end up going to war over these sorts of resource conflicts.

So let's recap. The non-violent government will have mechanisms ultimately backed by coordinated shunning to deter behavior deemed undesirable (i.e. crime) by their local community (i.e. state). The coordinated shunning will require the shunned individual to defect to another established community (another state) that will accept them. If their behavior/values are so unaccepted by society that there does not exist an established community to accept them, they will be forced to survive in the outskirts of civilization where they will almost surely die (basically acting as a death penalty for them not choosing to comply with the rules of the community they used to belong to) because it is incredibly difficult for even a small tribe much less an individual to survive and be self-sufficient in the wilderness. It becomes even more difficult for them to survive as the natural resources available to them further dwindle as more and more of the civilized communities claim and develop land for use in their societies (and therefore become unavailable to the shunned outcasts). These developed communities will inevitably run into conflicts with other developed communities that hold different values. These conflicts can potentially become an existential threat to the community, so they will need to organize and develop a specialized force to defend themselves (i.e. a military). Once one accepts that a military is needed to defend the community's existence from acts by other communities who wish to expand their usage of resources, then they must accept that their military must be well-equipped to handle the threats otherwise it would just be providing an illusion of security. So this sparks a cat-and-mouse game of developing better weapons technology compared to their enemies (and potential enemies).

So what are the differences again between what this "non-violent" community/government will surely evolve to become and the modern nation-state? Maybe it is that they allow people who break their rules and refuse to or cannot pay restitution to victims to leave the community to another one that may accept them, rather than holding them prisoner within their community? At first glance it is a nice thought I suppose, although it does totally change the game dynamics of deterrence via punishment which a sociopath will surely take advantage of if they know there is another community ready to accept them even after they commit their terrible acts.

Also, can such a society really function well without prisons? I am against retributive justice, but as far as I see there are two legitimate purposes for a prison. The first, which I consider the weaker of the two, is to act as a form of deterrence against highly undesired behavior (crimes) particularly in cases where monetary fines cannot act as a sufficient deterrence. For example, if someone is completely broke already and is unlikely to succeed in a job/career to earn enough money to cover more than the basic costs of survival, adding more fines to them is not going to deter them from crimes at all since they already don't have anything to lose from a financial perspective. The second purpose is to keep the rest of the population safe from someone deemed to be violent and dangerous. Now if there is no hope for rehabilitation, perhaps this usage of prison wouldn't be much different than simply shunning the individual from the community (assuming they can force them if necessary to actually leave and stay out of the physical territory of the community). Although even then, I doubt the community would be okay with allowing some group of people who, for example, killed many people in an act of terrorism to just leave the community to some safe haven to only regroup, re-plan, and try to attack again. However, more commonly, what about the case where someone's act of violence was a crime of passion, or mental illness, and society believes that with the proper help they can be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society? But in the mean time, I doubt society would accept for them to be left to roam free in their community and thus be likely triggered to commit similar act again. Without a prison system (granted I concede that the existing US prison system does a terrible job of rehabilitation, but it could in theory be changed to work better if there was enough pressure from citizens to demand change), the "non-violent" society would be forced to either live with the high risk of this volatile person continuing to live in their community committing another violent act or be forced to take the extreme position of shunning them from the community altogether, which if there is no other community that is willing to accept this person (with a now known history of violence), then that act of shunning would essentially act as death sentence. Is that really a more desirable society to live in? One where any act of violence committed by someone who is simply unable to pay full restitution for the damage they have caused should result in them effectively being sentenced to death even if they could be rehabilitated in time to no longer be a threat to society?

To me it seems that what the "non-violent" state-free government would evolve to would not be much different than the modern state. Call me a pessimist if you wish, but I believe this evolution would be an unavoidable result of the nature of humanity. Culture and education can of course influence human behavior and counteract certain negative aspects of human nature. And while I think that can and should be used to improve the state of society, I personally don't believe it can realistically make the "non-violent" society you envision radically different (in terms of the existence and need of aggression and violence in the society) compared to the modern state. In some ways, the outcomes of the society you describe in your writings that I believe are achievable seem more desirable to me than the current system, but these are improvements that I think if it were possible to achieve, could also be achieved through changes in policy within our existing society without completely abandoning the notion of a state. Of course in some other ways, the outcomes of the society you describe seem to me to be far more dangerous and terrible than the current system (of states) that we live with today.

And finally I will conclude by saying, yes, outcomes are what should matter in my opinion. If the emergent behavior of a system evolving according to certain imposed principles that were chosen due to a desire to see less violence and tragedy in the world instead led to an outcome of more violence and tragedy compared to an alternative system operating under difference principles, why would one wish to choose the former system? Now that is a claim about the state of the physical world, and I don't know for sure what would be the outcome of such a system. From a scientific perspective it would be interesting to see that experiment carried out to examine what the outcomes would actually be in reality. Of course, as with any science dealing with humans, there are ethical considerations that make doing the science properly very difficult. If we have strong reason to believe through previous historical case studies (granted you may argue deriving conclusions from those historical data points is flawed for a variety of reasons, but we can never have very pure data in this human-centric field unlike the hard sciences) that running the experiment could likely lead to mass human suffering (and not just of the people who voluntarily elected to take part in the experiment), then there is a serious moral dilemma with recommending or even allowing such an experiment to be carried out. But anyway, my point was about a hypothetical situation. Say we nearly all agreed that the likely outcome of that system based on "virtuous" principles would lead to more violence and tragic outcomes than an alternative system operating on other principles, but those other principles were not deemed "virtuous" perhaps because they reject the non-aggression principle. It seems strange to me to reject the system that is predicted to lead to less bad outcomes (assuming we all agree on what outcomes were bad versus good) in favor of the other system simply because of the principles behind them. Of course someone on the other side of the argument would say the same thing about my views; they would be confused how one can believe in ends justifying the means. Perhaps besides the differences of opinion about the true nature of the humanity and how humans would naturally behave in a true free society, this is probably the major reason for disagreement between rational anarchists and rational statists: deontological ethics versus consequentialism. As someone who doesn't believe in objective morality, I cannot say that one is objectively "right" and the other is objectively "wrong". But I can say that it is simply baffling to me why some people subscribe to deontological ethics, particularly people who are not indoctrinated into believing in a deity.