James, thanks for answering my questions about Alienation Nation.

This is a Harm City book, written and published prior to the Freddie Gray riots. This book, and the Q&A, are full of the gems your readers have come to expect. You give the familiar quote, "an armed society is a polite society," but you also note that the inverse is true, "a civilized society is a rude society." Even Miss Manners used to justify her job by writing that table manners are important because everyone at dinner is armed. This bit of wisdom, like so many others, has been lost to the vast majority of people. The continuum of violence that you describe, from verbal aggression to physical attack, has been broken by the State and its monopoly on force, resulting ironically, in more violence and intentionally obscured patterns of violence.