Is it possible that violence is the cheapest price it’s possible to pay for personal freedom? That seems counter intuitive. It depends what you mean by costly, and for whom. A society that allows the greatest extremes of personal freedom would mean a society that involves itself the least amount possible in other types of social control and soft power. All those other ways of regulating people’s behavior, of stopping it for merely being on a certain trajectory, all the demands that people police and regulate their own behavior, would be minimized. But at some point you would have to draw a line, and beyond that line the only remaining response would be extreme violence and censure. When you collapse all regulation of behavior except the extremes, you collapse all possible responses to behavior except the extremes.
I suppose you could reframe this economically. If you deliberately discount the value of all other forms of intervention, or suppress them by choice, so they have little currency and are not in any way encouraged or enforced or used at a societal or personal level, then the only form of hard check on behavior that would retain its value would be violence. It’s easy, it’s instant, it’s expedient, it has large effects. When you decrease the value of the state department and all its various forms of soft power, you concurrently increase the value of the military and its hard power. In the presence of a power vaccum, whatever remains increases in value and utility. In a limited market of few alternatives, hard power is likely to be the most affordable alternative available. I’m not sure this is the right framing. It mostly revolves around the relative value and utility of a potential social tool. If you decrease the value and utility of all other social tools, and reduce access, then whatever remains becomes the best value and easiest to access. So violence becomes the best bargain for social control, when all other options have been actively depressed. Violence is also fair straightforward and easy to produce. Other kinds of interventions are often quite complicated and difficult to produce. Chasing down potential causes and heading them off is a lot trickier and requires a lot more sophisticated judgment than just responding to an emerged problem after the fact. And if your goal is to maximize personal freedom on a social level, that really limits the effectiveness of all soft power solutions and increases the relative value of violence.
This is certainly a problem for policing. It’s extremely hard to know what people expect from a system set up in this way. If we also raise the cost of violence without increasing access to non-violent methods of restraining behavior (which all impinge on personal freedom at a point at which it has not yet led to obviously tranagressive results), then what solutions remain? Limits on behavior can be enforced at the social and individual level through prohibition of certain behaviors, social censure, and other forms of indirect intervention. Standard of behavior can also be encouraged and enforced through positive means (although any positive necessarily means whatever is outside the positive registers as a relative negative, this is mathematically unavoidable). Or limits on behavior can be enforced by direct intervention, after the fact, through overt punishment. And you can seek to directly reward good behavior. And those are pretty much all the options.
As a parent, you can offer direct and tangible hard punishments and rewards for actual outcomes, or you can address generative behaviors and either encourage or suppress them. If your goal is to maximize personal autonomy and freedom though, you’re sort of at the mercy of whoever that person happens to behave. If you have very pleasant assumptions about the nature of humans and children (and many parents do, at least until they actually have children) and what sort of behavior will just come naturally to them, you might be optimistic about the eventual need for direct interventions being unlikely.
Unfortunately, by the time you find out you’re wrong, you’ve already suffered the consequences of those unanticipated actions, and you’re already limited to force as a response (since it’s already too late for soft power to have forestalled them by altering the conditions that produced them). The argument, don’t you care that you caused this terrible effect is a little weak if you didn’t put any previous effort into producing the kind of person who would innately care about such a result, but rather allowed them to become the sort of person who would willingly produce it. In many ways, I judge such a system to be quite unfair. If you’re truly invested in avoiding certain outcomes, as well as in avoiding hard force responses to those outcomes, then you should be willing to invest honestly in the conditions that produce them. You should be willing to do your job as a parent. And that will likely including being paternalistic.
Finding the balance between paternalism and freedom is always a very difficult task in a complex society. Going all in on either strategy can be a problem. The important, things, I think, is to recognize ideologically that there is a balance to be discovered, that there are tradeoffs to both, that both have the potential to be dangerous, and both have the potential to be helpful. At the moment, though, we seem to be in a very confused state. Demanding that all curtailing of freedom is fundamentally morally evil, leaving us with no options but confrontation and violence when our limits are violated, and then complaining about the use of that violence. We decry standards meant to prevent evil and demand where everyone was and why nothing was done when moral evil is the inevitable result.
I wonder, in a way, if this isn’t something we’ve already done in other parts of our society. Maybe this explains the odd schizophrenia of our society with regard to sex, where permissiveness and understanding and license and exceptions are granted without quarter at all levels to promote personal freedom; except there is still a line, and when you cross it its not a little step but a massive shift beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior, and you suddenly switch from the atmosphere of tolerance and understanding and freedom and deterministic explanations for personal sovereignty to being the devil himself, subject to the language of the inquisition, exiled from humanity itself, and none of those previous arguments hold any sway.
Extreme libertarianism preserves only war as the province of the government. Which means that if the government feels it must ever deal with anything, it has no tool to wield other than military force. Perhaps social libertarianism has a similar structure.
Making Nobody Happy 