The Objection

You would not force the people you love to do it your way. And about now, most people have an objection. That works in a marriage or a relationship. A country is millions of strangers. People act in their own interest. They game every system, and they behave worse when nobody is watching. Some steal.

Some organize to do it for a living. Law and order is what makes a society function. Take that seriously, and test it against your own life. What is your greatest protection from other people? Most people answer fast. The police. The law. Now think about yesterday. The driver a few feet from you at seventy miles an hour.

The stranger behind you at the cash machine. The neighbor who knows when you are away. Every one of them could have hurt you, or taken from you. No police officer was watching any of them. And nothing happened. What stopped them was not the law. It was something they carry with them. Your greatest protection from other people is the other people's values.

The crime figures agree. In the United States in 2022, about a third of household thefts and break-ins were reported to the police at all. Of those, about one in eight was solved. That is roughly four in every hundred. Fear of arrest is not what keeps people out of your house. So what does?

Start where the objection started: people act in their own interest. Everyone is after the same thing, a good life. And everyone has learned what violence and theft do to one. Being robbed never made anyone happier. Neither does living among people who cannot trust you. Most people work out early that they get further by dealing than by taking.

That is not kindness. It is plain self-interest. But some people do steal. Yes. Some decide they are the exception: that what they want matters enough to take it. Organized crime is that decision turned into a business. And look at what it produces wherever it operates. Fear. Closed shops. People who stop trusting, stop building, stop dealing with each other.

Crime does not refute the principle. It demonstrates it. Coercion, theft and violence always reduce happiness, harmony and prosperity. Always. And nothing here asks you to stand by. Someone who takes by force owes a debt to the person they took from. Stopping them, and making them repay it, is not in question. And law and order?

Look at what it rests on. The law can deal with the exception. It cannot deal with everyone. It works because nearly everyone already holds the value. Order that rests on fear of punishment lasts as long as someone is watching. Order that rests on values holds when nobody is. Yesterday, nobody was. So look at where the objection started, and where it ends.

It started with the harm done by people who take what they want by force. Nobody disputes stopping them. But it ends somewhere else: with force as the way a society gets things done. This problem matters enough. Make them pay. Make them comply. You would not take from your neighbor yourself. Would you ask another neighbor to do it for you?

That is what a vote for force is. And if your protection is a value, what happens to that value in a society that practices its exception at every election? So carry the question this philosophy asks of anyone with a problem to solve. What kind of problem-solver or leader are you if no one is forced to do it your way?

All of this leans on one claim: that coercion, theft and violence always reduce happiness, harmony and prosperity. Is that true? You can check it against your own life. That is next: What Flourishing Actually Means. The whole series, in order, is at humanrespect.app.