You Never Make Peace With the State, a Lawyer Says

'You never make peace with the State': the debate

A lawyer let it drop in a conversation: you can have many personal enemies, but as long as they are specific people, you can always end up making peace. With the State, never. The short, sharp aphorism sparked a controversy that has ranged from the monopoly on violence to taxes, the US Second Amendment and citizen militias.

Almost no one disputes the starting point. The State is the institution that reserves for itself the legitimate use of force, and that definition is put bluntly: a bureaucratic machine that holds the monopoly on legal violence. For some, that is the whole indictment. For others, it is precisely what keeps coexistence from degenerating into permanent war.

The monopoly on legal violence, two versions

Part of the analysis accepts the diagnosis and takes it to the extreme: if the State is nothing more than an armed gang that legitimizes itself over time, its existence is incompatible with individual freedom. The objection comes immediately from the other side. The State would not be the problem, but rather the incivil organizations that have taken control of it; the way out is not to demolish it, but to take back its leadership. 'If we do away with it, the laws stop protecting us,' summarizes one of the contributions, which insists on retaking command and not bringing down the building.

The consensus, if any, is minimal: the State has been subverted, and that is where the sense of enmity comes from. The real disagreement is what to do with that finding.

A necessary evil or an organized incivil gang?

Some declare themselves unable to imagine another form of organization. Whoever proposes that alternative has no record of a country of millions of inhabitants ever existing without a State, and the antiestéticar of its absence —of the mafias taking over— weighs more than the antiestéticar of its presence.

On the other side, the accusation is functional: every human invention serves some purpose, and once the layers of veneer are peeled away —public services, roads, justice, activities already covered by previous institutions— what remains is a structure for extracting and distributing. A definition some subscribe to without nuance: an organized incivil gang.

The bill: taxes, dependency and a figure left hanging

The economic argument occupies much of the controversy. The State, it is argued, does not only collect: it manufactures dependency, and over time turns protection into a relationship of need. Hence the most uncomfortable reflection, the one that measures how radical the approach is: the worst possible State would not be the one that fails, but the one that worked perfectly. The one that guaranteed perpetual peace and paid 5.000 euros to every inhabitant forever would, by that logic, be the most dangerous of all, because it would restrict the human condition even more.

Criticism of social behavior is added, and the example cited is the pandemic. Some argue that 95% of the population applauded from their balconies and demanded harsher measures against those who did not comply, including reporting their neighbors. That episode is read as proof that the problem is not only the structure, but society's willingness to obey it.

An armed populace and the Second Amendment as a model

When the alternative is asked about, the most developed answer is the general arming of the people and a system of civic militias in which every citizen is trained. The idea is revived that political and civil freedom is incompatible with the existence of professional armies, extendable to the police. And the founding US texts are cited: firearms are equal in importance to the Constitution itself, and a well-regulated militia is the best defense of a free country.

The nuance comes here: the Second Amendment is defended, but it is considered the only good thing that country has left, and it is recalled that it exists because the people then had enough power to impose it. The conclusion: in Spain there is no legal room for anything like that and no majority could approve it.

The concejos abiertos (open town assemblies) and the democracy that did exist

Against the equation of democracy with a representative system, a concrete historical example appears. In the Iberian Peninsula, concejos abiertos operated with customary law, imperative mandate, common lands, family private property and municipal militias. They are placed between the VII and XII centuries, surviving until the XIX century, when the Constitution of 1812 put an end to them.

From this trinc a broader thesis: what is called parliamentary democracy today is in fact a representative system, that is, a pogre delegation of responsibilities in exchange for convenience. The same scheme applies to the United States, whose assembly-based origin would have gradually diluted into an imperial structure.

The unresolved calculation is always the same: if the State is the enemy with which there will never be peace, who pays for peace? Even the most generous imaginable State —the one that hands out 5.000 euros per head and guarantees perpetual calm— would still be, for hardliners, the worst possible enemy. And no one has yet explained how that arrangement would be financed without it.