by Jonathan Young

Created on: June 13, 2008

How a person answers this question depends on how he or she understands human nature. "A person is smart," the old saying goes. "People are stupid." The implication is that, left to themselves, most people will make clear-headed, ethical decisions. But just about everybody has witnessed a group of people collectively abandoning their common sense as responsibility diffuses throughout the crowd: who's in charge at a riot? And this abandonment of responsibility is much more serious for a crowd, because while a lone maniac can certainly break quite a few windows, he can't stack five cars together in a giant bonfire without a lot of assistance from his fellow soccer fans.

Because it's understood that a Viking horde is more dangerous than a lone Viking, most people oppose monopolizations of power. Even the most patriotic Americans don't fully trust various police and intelligence agencies, because history has shown that power tends to multiply itself: remove the checks and balances written into the U.S. system of law, and suddenly one demographic is calling for the mass imprisonment of another. The tribal instinct associated with prejudice, hatred, mass imprisonments, and genocide is expressed in fear, and because fear is very effective at overrunning reason, often resulting in war, it's necessary for a state to exist, managing tribalism and xenophobia in the interest of social solidarity.

But it goes without saying that not all states are created equal. Throughout history, people have found it necessary to destroy corrupt and inhumane governments, replacing them with the most humanistic conflict-manager yet to be invented, representative democracy. So even if order is better than unchecked personal liberty, the individual retains the authority to accept or reject the validity of government. In a society governed by rational lawmakers and police, personal liberty is actually enhanced, because the country provides resources that the individual alone could not produce. But in a kleptocracy, which is a society governed by greedy, fearful lawmakers and police, the government demands labor and obedience without offering any liberty-enhancing resources to its citizenry. A kleptocracy creates a society in which the assertion of personal liberty becomes supremely important, and the solution for the oppressed is to stage a revolution, as in the American revolution.

The rule of law protects human rights, but when a government abandons fairness and reason, that government loses the right to exist. I could go on about this, but the Declaration of Independence says it much better than I ever could:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

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