Broken Promises, Living Protocols

Why the collapse of state security is an invitation to collective regeneration.

Aude and I have been having the topic of physical security coming up more and more in communities we care for all over the world. It's a very touching and hard topic for many of us. As much as it signals unraveling of social contract it also represents an opportunity to reestablish care. Here is some processing and reality coupling around the concept.

“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
— Jane Addams

There was a time when the promise of protection defined the very birth of the one of the oldest the monetary traditions we live in. Roman legions, not merchants, first standardized coins (called ‘money’ after Juno Monetta aka Hera - the goddess of protection)— not as tools of trade, but as instruments of empire. You could/must work for the Roman state, earn their stamped metal, and then pay them back in taxes for protection from threats ... real or fabricated. This was the original security service economy: often coercion cloaked as order, weaponized harm prevention, where the price of safety was allegiance to mafia charading as empire.

Today, that promise rings hollow (empty) more and more. As state infrastructures fray and the social contracts built on them collapse, one question resurfaces: Who protects us, really?

Security --- once communal, relational, and embedded in culture -- has long been handed over (taken by) the state, monetized, and monopolized. But what happens when that state no longer shows up? When the firetruck or ambulance doesn’t come, when the police don't protect but profile, when the courts feel alien and the state money no longer buys trust and security?

In Jackson, Mississippi — a city where disinvestment is generational and forgetting was never an option — Cooperation Jackson holds a living memory of what mutual security services look like. And in Kenya, Nyumba Kumi (“Ten Houses”) reminds us that safety doesn’t need sirens and badges. It needs neighbors.

This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about remembering. Not just memory as archive, but as practice. Security … understood as the limitation of domination … must be a community skill again. What would it mean to seed economic pools that acknowledge security services without those very services becoming domination forces? Vouchers as commitments to care, to vigilance, to watching each other’s children, to walking each other home. Imagine communities issuing vouchers for night watch shifts or conflict mediation, redeemable not in fiat but in food, labor, or healing ... the real metabolism of community. Let’s call these what they are: metabolic flows ... Curation, Valuation Limitation and Excahnge. Limitation is not repression .. it is how life organizes around thresholds. In the forest, it's the mycelium sensing too much nitrogen in one root system and redistributing it elsewhere. In society, it is a grandmother standing in the path of violence, refusing to let harm pass. Both are security services.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We have always had models: rotational labor practices like Mweria, care circles, Indigenous land defenders, sex worker mutual aid groups, Peace Huts in Liberia, the Bayou’s second lines turned survival brigades after the flood — all protectors, all outside the state’s salary.

This isn’t a utopia of everlasting smiles. It’s care. If money was a promise of protection, then failed protection invalidates the currency. A state that cannot secure its people .. physically, emotionally, ecologically .. forfeits its right to demand tribute (if it ever had one in the first place).

What comes next isn't collapse. It's compost. From the remains of broken contracts, communities are growing new ones … rooted in ancestral practice, governed by mutual commitment, and nourished by living economies.

We’re not calling for violence – but rather care. We’re calling for memory and sense making. For commitments made in daylight and fulfilled in the dark when most needed. For economies where watching out for each other is not an unpaid burden, but a consciously valued contribution.

Every thriving organism .. forest or village .. can limit domination through relationship. When we protect and care for each other, we restore the circle.