We have psychiatric hospitals and maximum-security prisons.

Their “clients” remind us that there are very real psychopaths, maniacs, serial killers, and other problematic characters. Most of them are not Dexters or Hannibal Lecters, and they do not act in accordance with the public good. Due to the peculiarity of the processes occurring in their brains, there is no clear way to convince them using reasons or arguments.

How can ostracism help against them?

What would a system for searching and destroying or isolating such “Jack the Rippers” look like? If it is isolation rather than destruction, then with whose money and by whose efforts?

анонимный вопрос

People value security and are willing to pay for it. Inadequate aggressors are not just dangerous, but because of their apparent irrationality, this danger seems even more serious than if people applied the cold reason of an insurance agent. The same considerations apply here as to why people fear terrorist attacks more than car accidents, even though mortality from the latter is much higher.

The most obvious market agent that could provide such a service is, of course, insurance companies. They collect premiums while the client is safe and pay out a benefit in insured cases. Therefore, assuming that insurance companies act in good faith and do not cheat their clients, it is in their interest to promote the maximum safety of their clients.

But security from maniacs can be provided in different ways, and this is determined by social mores. Clients may desire security from packs of stray dogs but categorically protest against their wholesale extermination, so those who undertake to satisfy this whim will have to account for the corresponding restriction in means.

Similarly, simple empathy no longer allows our wealthy and prosperous society (and under ancap it is presumably expected to be even wealthier and more prosperous) to demand security from violent psychotics through their extermination; rather, it is a matter of treatment. Again, a mental disorder may be acquired rather than innate, for example, as a result of trauma, and before that, the person could well have been a respected client of an insurance company. Thus, the obvious line of thought in our case would be the search for methods of treatment.

Will this be expensive? Pennies. I did not mention the comparison between terrorist attacks and car accidents for nothing. A disproportionate amount is spent on preventing terrorist attacks. In the same way, violent psychotics will receive a disproportionate amount of attention, although their number is completely negligible. Of course, if a person with mental problems had an insurance policy, they would receive higher quality and more expensive treatment, but even if there was no policy, they would still be attempted to be returned to normalcy, and by quite humane methods.