I do not like vigilantism. But.

This is always the way that vigilantism starts. It is, indeed, most common in areas where government is weak or corrupt. But the problem is that once the problems the vigilante committees were formed to solve are solved, the committees never seem to have one last meeting and vote, "Well now that's taken care of, so we can disband and go back to our regular jobs." There's always just one more bad guy to be taken down. In many cases the "bad guy" is actually one of the good guys who's trying to keep the rabble from burning down the government buildings.

Power corrupts. People who volunteer to join vigilante committees, with their guns, their nighttime chases, their abbreviated trials, their summary judgments and their gruesome theatrical executions, are the hotheads who are most easily corrupted. These are exactly the people who should never be given power.

How many good people do you think you'd have to kill in order to arrest the Pope and put him on trial in your little wallaby court? How evil would you be once you've talked yourself into committing that many murders? How could you ever reintegrate yourself into civil society with all that on your conscience? When the widows and orphans of all those policemen you murdered stand vigil in front of your home, and your wife and children have to walk past them every time they go out, what are you going to tell them?

The most famous vigilante organization in the United States is the Ku Klux Klan. The most common form of vigilante execution in the United States is lynching. The majority of people in the United States who were executed by vigilantes were Afro-Americans in the South and nearby regions with large populations of Southern sympathizers. The Klan believed that the government wasn't doing its job. My God, they must have been taken over by subversives in order to enact an evil program like Reconstruction. We have no choice but to do their job for them. Let's ride!

All human creations occasionally fail, but that's no reason to throw them out.

The law is one of those creations.

This is how it starts

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First, patience. Not all wrongs can be righted, and even those that can, cannot always be righted in the same generation during which they occurred.

Nonetheless, civilization has muddled along quite well for eleven thousand years. Its progress has hardly been monotonic, since there have been a few colossal reversals such as the Bronze Age Collapse, but there can be no argument that in the long run our species has built ever-better institutions. We have continued to transcend our own inner nature, overriding the Stone Age instincts of our Inner Caveman with reasoned and learned behavior.

The Electronic Revolution in particular has proven to be a major resource in our slow climb up Maslow's Hierarchy. People who can communicate can learn and organize, and people who can learn and organize can triumph over the corrupt leadership that gets away with the crimes you list.

The Church is a Bronze Age institution with no place in a post-industrial civilization. So naturally its very existence catalyzes behavior that would have been sanctioned in the Bronze Age. This is a perfect example of the need for patience. Religion is losing its vise-grip on civilization in Europe and the Antipodes, and this is happening by sheer attrition, without vigilante justice. The same will happen in the rest of the world eventually. The fact that we won't live to see it is hardly a reason to pout, much less organize a lynch mob.

Refer back to my previous remarks about patience. It takes civilization centuries to improve, but it does. Violence only slows down the progress.

So you live in a country without elections? Or are you just impatient and expect changes to occur faster than they can be reasonably expected to occur?

Never forget the Law of Unintended Consequences: "You can never do just one thing." Those who commit violence for a noble cause invariably cause second-order effects, and often they're worse than the evil they set out to banish.

Good point. Revenge is one of the strongest human emotions, and it is also the most evil of them all.

Talk about ruinous second-order effects! Every person you execute for what you see as a noble cause has a family. Once you have killed him, those relatives can no longer see the problem you were trying to fix: all they see is the blood in their eyes, because you're the bastard who killed their daddy/ husband/ brother/ son/ friend/ priest. This is how feuds start, and this is how politicians start wars. By the third day of a war every soldier on both sides is simply taking revenge for the comrades whom the bastards on the other side killed yesterday.

Can you imagine what the world would be like a week or two after someone assassinated the Pope? Hundreds of millions of Catholics with a single mission: find him, kill him, and kill all of his evil countrymen.

Just the Irish terrorists alone would be enough to bomb us back into the Stone Age.

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It's difficult for children to practice patience. That's one of the hundreds of reasons why we don't put them in charge. In fact, it isn't until around age 30 that humans acquire the complete set of adult cognitive skills, such as risk analysis, deferred gratification, and present-value discounting. This is why the world is very likely to continue becoming more rational and less violent as the average age of the population continues to increase.

Justice must not be micro-managed. You have to achieve justice for the entire population, not just one demographic. This invariably requires compromise.

History is replete with horrible events caused by one group demanding justice for itself, without caring about the second-order effects it would bring to the rest of the human race.

The Nazis are probably the most well-known example. The Germans just wanted justice for the exaggerated humiliation that the Treaty of Versailles caused them.

If after its defeat in WWII we had punished the Germans for their war crimes proportionally to the punishment they received for their considerably less evil deeds in WWI, we would have handed the keys to all the Allied war resources to the Jews and allowed them to exterminate the entire population. Would that be a better world today?