I. The Uncomfortable Premise
Every legal system rests on a foundation polite society prefers not to examine closely: the state’s monopoly on legitimate force. Law is not the opposite of violence. It is force that has been organized, ritualized, and given a paper trail. A statute is a promise that force will be applied if you cross a certain line, delivered by people with the institutional backing to make the threat credible. What separates “law” from “violence” in ordinary speech is not the absence of force but the presence of consent, or at least the appearance of it.
This is not cynicism. It is the founding insight of serious theories of the state, from Hobbes to Weber’s definition of the state as the entity that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a territory. The word doing the work is legitimate. Force used by the state is called law enforcement. The same act by anyone else is called assault or kidnapping. The difference is not in the physics. A body restrained is a body restrained. The difference is in the surrounding story that tells everyone involved, including the person restrained, that this force is different in kind.
That story is the subject of this essay. Call it the mortar.
II. Law as Mortar, Not Stone
Institutions like to present themselves as stone: permanent, load-bearing, obviously legitimate because they have always been there. Law is more like mortar, a slow-setting binding agent that has to be maintained by everyone inside it. It depends on a shared belief that the rules apply to everyone, that the process is basically fair, and that submitting to a police officer differs from submitting to a mugger because a larger story makes that submission sensible and eventually protects you too.
When the story holds, law’s force is invisible. A speeding ticket does not feel like a threat backed by restraint, confiscation, and ultimately jail, though that is the chain beneath it.
That invisibility is produced daily by more than belief. It is produced by the small human frictions the system still permits: the officer who lets something slide, the clerk who hears an explanation, the judge who still has room to see a person rather than a score. Discretion is not a leak in the machine. It is load-bearing. It is how coercion becomes something a person can explain, appeal, and survive.
Mortar can thin. It thins when the shared story stops being shared, when a growing number of people no longer experience the law as theirs but as something imposed by people who do not share their risks. The law does not then become less forceful. It becomes visibly forceful, because the fiction that made the force invisible has failed.
III. The Narrowing of Legitimacy
Consider who actually exercises the monopoly on force: legislators who write rules, judges and prosecutors who apply them, police who enforce them, and the concentrations of wealth that shape all three. Call this cluster, loosely, the enforcement class. It is not a conspiracy. It is a structural position: the people for whom the law reliably works as protection rather than mainly as threat.
It also designs the board. It writes the laws, deploys the technology, and defines what counts as a violation. Everyone else reacts inside a game already in progress.
For a large and growing number of people outside that cluster, the relationship is inverted. Law appears in their lives mainly as surveillance and constraint: the algorithm that scores their productivity, the stop for a broken taillight, the court date they cannot miss without losing a job, the eviction notice, the wage garnishment. For them, law feels less like a shared project than an instrument held by people they cannot meaningfully appeal to.
The information each side holds is as lopsided as the power. Institutions see aggregates: crime statistics, compliance rates, risk scores. They rarely see whether the law still feels like ours. The people subject to it see the stop, the score, and the eviction, with no view into the institutions that produced them.
This is the precondition for a “hostile-other” frame: the sense that the surrounding order is not a “we” that includes you but a “they” arrayed against you. It is not a diagnosis of individual pathology. It is a predictable response to chronic precarity, humiliation, and uneven exposure to enforcement. And once someone crosses into it, law’s force stops being invisible mortar and becomes simply force.
IV. Two Logics, One Feedback Loop
Once the shared story fractures, two behavioral logics appear, and they reinforce each other.
Enforcement institutions facing rising disorder have essentially one lever: more enforcement. That is less a moral failing than a structural one. Legislators, courts, and police are built to answer instability with more rules, surveillance, and punishment. They are rarely able, in ordinary operation, to answer it by sharing power or accepting a less predictable order in exchange for a more legitimate one.
The population drifting into a hostile-other frame does not usually organize or aim at overthrow. Its alienation shows up as small, diffuse, symbolic acts: refusal of minor cooperative norms, road rage, instant escalation when a stranger offers what, in the old shared story, would have been a reasonable correction. These are not strategic acts. They are communicative ones.
Each side’s response confirms the other’s fears. Escalation confirms, for the alienated, that the system is hostile. Volatility confirms, for the enforcers, that more enforcement is needed. Neither side sees itself as the aggressor. This is not a war between two armies. It is a feedback loop between two stories that no longer recognize each other.
The trap is stable because each side is responding to its real, short-term incentives. The official who grants discretion mid-crisis risks liability. The individual who complies alone in a hostile environment risks continued extraction with nothing in return. Moral exhortation, whether be less punitive or comply more, cannot fix a trap built from real incentives. Only changing the incentives can: longer time horizons, commitment devices that make restraint durable, and changes in what institutions can see and count as success.
The two sides are not even the same kind of agent. Institutions optimize against metrics and budgets. People living under them respond to whether the order still feels like theirs. You cannot out-optimize your way to a shared story by adjusting enforcement at the margin. The variable that has to move is legitimacy, and legitimacy is not a setting on the enforcement dial.
V. Automating the Old Contract
New tools are entering this loop and are not repairing it. Algorithmic administration is being deployed mostly on the enforcement side: automated surveillance, scheduling and productivity scoring, risk assessment, compliance. These tools do not reduce precarity. They make managing it more efficient. They remove the human friction that used to soften the law’s edges in practice even when it did not change on paper.
That friction was not inefficiency. It was the off-ramp. Automation turns a repeated encounter that used to have memory, context, and the possibility that this time might go differently into a sequence of one-shot applications of a fixed rule. The shadow of the future, which lets cooperation survive in a long game, is engineered out. Soft enforcement does not merely go unchosen. It becomes unavailable.
The predictable result is that the population in the hostile-other frame grows. And its belief that “society” means only enforcement becomes less a distortion and more an accurate description of daily life.
VI. The Spectrum of the Symptom
This dynamic shows up first in the smallest acts of non-cooperation: trash left in a shared space, refusal to take part in common upkeep. Society files these under “people are rude,” because acknowledging their cause would mean admitting the mortar is thinning even where stakes are lowest.
At the far end of the same spectrum are confrontations that escalate to violence, and at the extreme, catastrophic acts by people who have fallen entirely out of any shared story. These are usually read as isolated or inexplicable. A more structural reading is that they sit on a continuum with the smallest refusals: different amplitudes of the same withdrawal from treating the shared order as one’s own.
VII. What Law Cannot Do to Fix This
Faced with rising volatility, enforcement reaches for its only tool. But law’s force is made legitimate by a shared story, and a shared story cannot be restored by force. Enforcement can suppress a given act, in a given place, at a given moment. It cannot manufacture the sense of belonging whose absence produced the act. Each added increment of enforcement, aimed at people who already read enforcement as proof of their exclusion, tends to confirm that exclusion.
That is the paradox at the center of any honest account of law and violence: the tool law has for restoring order is the tool whose overuse erodes it.
VIII. The Choice Beneath the Mortar
Law and violence are not opposites to be balanced. Law is force, organized, delayed, and, when it works, made legitimate by a story broad enough that most people most of the time do not experience it as force at all. That story is not self-maintaining. It has to be re-earned continuously, through the perception among the people subject to enforcement that the order is also theirs: that they have a stake, a voice, and a path to a future inside it.
The oldest question in political philosophy, what makes the state’s force different from anyone else’s, has never had a permanent answer. It has only had temporary ones, renewed generation by generation through a shared story that the ruled and the ruling both have reason to believe. That maintenance cannot be done by enforcement alone, cannot be lectured into being, and cannot be optimized from one side. It is the invisible infrastructure beneath every law that has ever held.