… is and always has been THE political and moral issue, the core around which all the other argumentation swirls. [Proposition One]
Oddly enough, it’s not greatly controversial in and of itself: nearly everyone’s against it. The arguments start from the difficulty in addressing it except via other forms of coercion (the act of forcing someone to refrain from coercing, and/or using coercive force after the fact to create a disincentive against coercing people). From there they devolve into considerations of which specific coercions are primary and therefore illegitimate and therefore appropriate to respond to coercively, and which specific coercions are legitimate acts in defense of self or others against primary coercions.
One person’s notion of “freedom” is another person’s horrifying vision of “predators with a license to coerce”. A different person’s vision of “freedom” is the embodiment of yet another’s worries about a “police state”.
Defining “freedom” has always been spectacularly difficult and seldom prone to creating clarity and unity among dissenting people. Would an attempt to operationalize “coercion” work any better? Perhaps. Freedom is elusive and complex, and it may be simpler to denote a more limited category of what it is not. After all, the spirit of freedom would seem to indicate that you restrict the minimum that is “what freedom is not” and everything else goes, rather than trying to directly define what “everything else” consists of and then set about trying to permit it all!
Is “coercion” enough? Some might say otherwise. If I murder my neighbor, has my neighbor been coerced except in the most convoluted of constructs (I have forced my neighbor to be dead)? I myself would not say otherwise: much of the time when I might murder my neighbor, the act occurs as the fulfillment of a threat that prior to the murder existed as “you either do this (or refrain from doing that) or I will kill you”. (Or I will kill your wife or whatever). I submit that if we bracket those off and deal with them as part of coercion, the remaining ones, such as they exist, are not a major social concern. Then there are the old arguments about sins and iniquities in which no one has been coerced: incest, getting high on drugs, eating too much chocolate cake, etc. In this environment I’m sure I can just wave my hand in that general direction and say “the cure is always worse than the disease, if we even consider it to be ‘unfortunate’ at all” and most of you will nod.
For the sake of discussion will you go with the proposition that we really can ignore (“permit”) all human behavior which is not coercive, and focus our attention on coercion as the problem?
[Proposition Two]
All serious attempts to formulate a structure to allow us to interact with each other free from coercion have relied upon coercion as a response to coercion. They cannot be said to have been abject failures (insofar as all of our societies, states, nations, etc, can be so categorized), but they can be said to have fallen short of providing a coercion-free environment even if we ignore coercion when it is an intervention against predatory coercion. That is to say, there has continued to be plenty of primary coercion (coercion that does not present itself as intervening against other coercion) as well as plenty of what I’ll call “corrupt secondary coercion” (coercion that exists within the framework of intervention and protection but which in practice operates towards ends other than stopping primary coercion).
The best attempts, the most successful attempts, have been the most democratic and egalitarian of structures (i.e., with the least structural separation between those who coercively intervene on behalf of the social order, including both the creation of and the enforcement of coercive laws against coercions) and the most lenient and permissive as well (i.e., with the widest set of guarantees of freedoms, with restrictions on what can be restricted, and with some broad guidelines spelling out the circumstances under which behavior can be restricted and for what reason, outside of which it should not be, etc).
Therefore it seems it would not be a silly premise if I were to posit that if we were to try an even more egalitarian, even more permissive system, we could anticipate even more success: a functioning structure with even less coercion.
[Proposition Three]
We have room in that direction in which we could go. Without disparaging the state of our existing democracies (for they do function, and quite well given the existing baseline for comparison) or what they have accomlished in terms of providing a relatively coercion-free existence (for we are indeed relatively free, most of us most of the time under most circumstances, especially given the baseline for comparison), I think it remains indubitably true that we could increase the amount of egalitarian, participatory democracy (i.e., lowering the extent to which laws apply to people, and are enforced against them, without them having had an equal role in crafting those laws and playing a role in enforcing them), and that we could increase the degree of permissiveness as well (i.e., ways to curtail the circumstances under which the range of activities permitted to the participants can be infringed).
Agree or disagree?
If agree, what are some concrete changes we could make?
Also: Could some portion of this be done on an experimental basis? That is, instead of starting out with changes to the laws and structures of (for example) the UK or the government of Iceland or whatever, could we learn anything from a trial structure of some sort, somewhere, and see what would and would not work, just to gain some data on it beforehand?
