When The Only Safety You Have Is What You Provide for Yourself

What happens when the government abandons some of its responsibilities under the Social Contract?

This video has been making the rounds. I've seen it on YouTube and Twitter, but I like Second City Cop's take on why this is happening. Second City Cop: Ass-Whipping

After giving a definition of the Social Contract, the agreement between the governed and the government, SCC asks, "What happens when the government abandons its part of the agreement to provide protection, safety and security?"

Well first, you have a breakdown of law and order, and then you have people providing their own security.

Someone wiser than us said that the Law isn't there to protect the citizens - it's there to protect the lawbreakers from what the citizens would do to them if there weren't police around. When the Social Contract ceases to exist, you have people taking the Law into their own hands, to exact the Justice that used to be the job of the police, the courts and the State.

You have, quite simply, vigilantes.

And we are cheering them on.

Second City Cop has a link to Twitter (or X or whatever it is now), but that video only shows the 1st half of the incident. This is a video from a local Los Angeles TV station, titled California 7-Eleven workers beat robber with stick until suspect starts crying. It covers the entire incident, and is only 4 and a half minutes long.

This incident of course calls out Hobbes and his book Leviathan. That book covers, in part, what happens to society as a whole when law and order are not enforced by some governmental power.

In particular, the store owners in Stockton, California knew that calling the police would do nothing. They would not come. And if they came, no punishment would be handed down. California - or the legislature anyway - has decided that enforcing the law is mean, and so shoplifting will no longer be punished by the government. And so they realize that they live in what Hobbes described as a time of war.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. [My emphasis. Z-Deb]

Everyone who walks into their store is an enemy, potentially at least. And the only safety/security they enjoy is the security that they provide by their own strength.

Of course there is still the chance that the government of California will intervene in this case, but not to support the (otherwise) law-abiding, tax-paying store owners.

Which brings to mind another quote. This one is the 2nd paragraph to the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

I'm not sure that the government of California is organized to ensure the safety and happiness of its citizens.

UPDATE: The store owners are under investigation.