It has already been tried, both the ages before govt, every time govt fell down, and in the case of San Francisco, just got way too lax.

The idea that we can somehow get away without governance (or intelligence ops, or policing) is born completely of very high privilege — it completely assumes that all the things that the govt does just happen automatically.

It is just like the idiot new manager who arrives and sees that the halls and offices are clean so fires the janitorial staff as excess cost or because they are inconvenient.

Of course there are overreaches and abuses of intelligence, and the very concept of policing and everything about it's training, practice, accountability, and results needs to be burnt to the ground and overhauled.

But that does NOT mean that we can get away without it. Because, as you noted, even a little time without it becomes a disaster.

The key is not to abandon intelligence. The key is to strengthen democracy, make sure that the institutions of democracy, lawmaking, executive, judicial, press, academia, industry, ngos, and individual people all have their own separate power base and independence.

In autocracies, all of these are bent to the service of the leader/oligarch.

In democracies, there are all kinds of visible flaws, but they tend to be self-correcting, because there is oversight and balance of power. That alone does not prevent overreach or abuses, but it does lead to them being eventually corrected.

As Churchill said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others."