Why Should We Have to Live with Bad People?

Ban. Banish. Build a wall.

As I promised in my first Substack post, there will be times when I present fully formed concepts and other times when I will work out ideas on the fly, with you. This will be one of the latter. Some will find the end of this post controversial or triggering. But I would like you to give it a chance.

This will also require some preamble. So, in order not to bury the lede, allow me first to try to summarize the inchoate thought I am having:

We assume, and are told, that we have no choice but to deal, in one way or another, with the bad apples among us—the criminals, psychopaths, and others who tend to spoil an otherwise comparatively harmonious barrel. I have begun to question this assumption.

We’ll be begin by taking a quick look at the three most famous visions of man in a state of nature:

• Hobbes:
  Man is a brute, and in the absence of strong governance, he creates a “war of all against all” in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

• Rousseau:
  Man is born free and good (albeit primitive), and is ruined by property, economic specialization, and the institutions of society.

• Locke:
  Most people are decent, but a few bad apples spoil the barrel, so we require a small amount of impartial, third-party justice.

Hobbes cannot be right, or we never would have made it this far. If we were as bad as Hobbes said, we would have slaughtered each other long before we could have ever agreed to any Leviathanian contract with a Sovereign. Moreover, if we were truly that bad, the Sovereign would also be that bad, in which case no such social-contractarian agreement could have worked.

(That is, in fact, a standard libertarian/anarchist argument: If we are so rotten that we must be forcibly governed, then those who govern will also be rotten, and thus govern in rotten fashion. Did Hobbes ever even address that objection?)

Rousseau also cannot be right. We are clearly not born good. Babies are not evil, but if you’ve ever spent a day or two with them, you know that they’re not good, either. They are wonderful, cute, squalling balls of pure selfishness. Most kids will grow up to become Veruca Salts (or worse) without some moral instruction and guidelines from their parents. And Rousseau’s notion that property ruins people is just as far off the mark as his notion that there exists a collective “general will,” and that individuals who do not comply with the general will must be “forced to be free.” (At the risk of using an ad hominem here, I am going to have to side with David Hume and note that Rousseau was “plainly mad, after having long been maddish.”)

Of these visions, I strongly believe that Locke’s was closest to the mark.

Experts in criminal justice will tell you that the vast majority of crimes are committed by repeat offenders—many of whom offend over and over and over until they are finally put in jail for life. (Then they go on offending in jail.) We can easily sidestep deeper moral questions about whether or not humans are inherently good or inherently flawed, and just note the evidence before our eyes: that most people are decent and well-behaved enough to function in society, and a small percentage of people are not.

Okay, so there’s that. Now…

I have spoken at some length about one of the signature human pathologies: the notion that because we are an ultra-social species who live and interact in groups, we therefore must forcibly impose single ways of life on large groups of people in large areas.

This is so ingrained in us that most people cannot even conceive that any other option might be possible. And the instant you even suggest that any other option might be possible—without even saying what that option might be—the record needle goes scratching across the vinyl and you hear something like this:

You’re a radical individualist. You hate people.
You want atomization!
Don’t you care about others?
No man is an island, you autistic misanthrope.
What, do you want to be a hermit or something?

Frankly, it has become boring and predictable.

Here is what I (and others who argue along similar lines) actually mean. The story begins like this…

• We are an ultra-social species.

• Because we are an ultra-social species, we live and interact in groups.

• Because we live and interact in groups, we need rules.

So far, so good. All that is true. But then it starts to go wrong.

First, what sort of rules do we need?

Language has rules, but those rules are not imposed by anyone; they emerge organically. Yes, grammar teachers and dictionary people guide the process somewhat, but they are describing and codifying rules, not making them. The rules emerged organically, well outside of their control, and when those rules change organically, as they always do, they then codify the changes. Language unfolds according to rules, and yet is an unguided process.

This same emergent process produces the phenomenon of a free market, in which prices, wages, and the allocation of resources emerge, and find a constantly changing equilibrium, as the result of millions of voluntary transactions and decisions made by buyers, sellers, and producers. There is no conscious hand guiding the process; rather, there are millions of separate individuals making decisions they believe to be in their benefit, based on personal knowledge of their circumstances and needs. There are rules involved, but those rules are natural and organic rather than invented and imposed.

Second, as I mentioned above, is the general assumption that our ultra-social nature requires that everyone in a given area must live in a particular way. This has many pathological manifestations…

It drives people nutty, for example, when others do no think or believe the same things—even when those different beliefs have no impact on anyone else. What do you mean, you believe that the wine and wafer actually turn into the blood and body of Christ? I must slaughter you!

Why? How does that belief impact anyone else, so long as the believer is not forcing it on anyone else? And yet people are so freaked out by different beliefs that they react viscerally, and sometimes violently, to them.

This, I believe, is a toxic outcome of our ultra-social nature. Something like this:

We are biologically wired to be social. Different beliefs cause disharmony. I’d better force everyone to believe the same thing……y’know, for the good of the tribe and all. And hey, it might as well be my thing—right?

Our ultra-social nature produces conflict, conformity, and collectivism. We might even produce a sample argument describing the subconscious reasoning at work:

• Humans want and need to be together. (True)

• Humans naturally live and interact together in groups. (True)

• Cooperation is a human superpower. (True)

Therefore (many people assume),

#1
Everyone must conform to a certain way of living.

This is true, but only to a point. People must not violate the nonaggression principle and the basic rules of natural law. That is true. And people ought not make complete antisocial spectacles of themselves—for their own good as much as anyone else’s. That is also true…although unlike violations of the nonaggression principle, which may rightly be met with protective force, there is nothing enforceable against people who are simply irritatingly weird.

Yet this conclusion is always taken way, way too far, resulting in stultifying conformity. (And in the shocking results of the Asch conformity experiments.)

#2
People must be forcibly subordinated to the will, and the utilitarian aims, of the collective.

We could fill a dozen libraries with books on all that is wrong with this phenomenon. Indeed, many such books have been written—mostly critiques of communism and socialism, which are the apex of this attitude. Yet this attitude is pervasive among many, to varying degrees. Every time you hear “the common good” or “public opinion,” gird your loins, for some individuals are about to be sacrificed on the Altar of the Collective. (Of course, we must also note that the “will of the collective” always ends up getting “interpreted” by a small group of people in power.)

#3
One-size-fits-all solutions must be imposed on large groups of people in large areas.

“After all, we have to find ways to live together.” People say this as if the conclusion is self-evident. How else are you going to do it?

To most, the question answers itself: There is no other possible way. We must have nation states. The nation states must impose a single order on everyone. The order must be nonconsensual.

If you have been reading more for more than a couple of days, then you know I entirely challenge this assertion. And I know that many of you who have been reading me for a few months are beginning to challenge it too.

Though the pathway forward isn’t fully known, we are waking up to the reality that we still have some evolving to do. That “democracy” is not the ultimate evolution in the story of human freedom. That a consensual order is actually possible.

I taxonomized a range of possible manifestations of such an order in a popular piece: What Kind of a World Do You Want? In the briefest of summaries…

In a world in which consent is respected and social and political arrangements aren’t forcibly imposed upon unwilling people, a two broad phenomena will arise:

Some people will contract with private agencies to acquire the services we normally associate with government: security and insurance against aggression; justice and third-party adjudication of disputes; and roads and other infrastructure.

Other people will start, or choose to participate in, independent polities that make their own rules and experiment with particular modes of operation and ways of life. Some of these might even be illiberal or very strict (think the Amish), but the distinguishing feature will be consent: participation will be voluntary, by mutual agreement, rather than enforced.

There will be many manifestations and combinations of these phenomena…

There will be city states, free nations, and private-law jurisdictions. There will be “countries” run by companies. Some might be run by “sovereign joint-stock companies” in the model described by Curtis Yarvin. Others will be very different. (Fledgling versions of these have already begun to spring up. And others have existed in the human past.)

There will be internally self-governing intentional communities of every kind. There will be distributed nations and autonomous organizations united by factors beyond geography. Eventually there will be ocean settlements and exocolonies. And much more.

And, of course, there will be areas in which market anarchism allows people to choose from a menu of providers of governance-like services.

So, with all of that as necessary preamble, we now get to the main event, in which we challenge the other presumption that results from our ultra-social nature, which is simply this:

That because of the fact that we must live in groups, we must accept the presence of bad apples.

Think of it. The vast majority of crime is committed by a tiny fraction of people. How much crime would vanish if you simply no longer had to live in the same place with them? How much happier would life be? How many resources would be saved and available for more productive endeavors than just keeping criminals at bay.

A significant portion of wealth also goes into redistribution—not just to the small fraction of truly needy, but to the much larger proportion of people who are simply gaming the system: individuals, corporations, and interest groups who are proving Frédéric Bastiat correct when he said that, “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

Who says you have to allow that? Who says you even have to let grifters into your midst? Why must every human community be forced down to the lowest common denominator of its worst actors?

What if you could simply exclude them?

Oh, but you cannot. Humans are ultra-social, dontcha know. wE hAVe tO fiNd WaYs to LiVe tOgEtHeR.

There’s that same pathologization of our social nature, telling us that our ONLY CHOICE is conflict, conformity, and collectivism.

But is it?

If someone is causing problems on your property now, you are free to expel them, and even to forbid them from returning. That is what property is: exclusive, dispositive decision-making authority over a particular area or thing. It’s yours, and you may exclude others from its use.

In a world of consensual order, property rises dramatically in importance. Property rights are respected. Rights of association are respected. Consent is respected. (Imagine that.)

Want to have a members-only intentional community or private-law jurisdiction? You can exclude whoever you want.

Want to require ID to enter a private polity in which residents have agreed to live certain basic rules? You can do that too. (In fact, my wife’s parents live in a variant of such a community now. These would become more common, more sovereign, and have far better contractual arrangements, in a condition of consensual order.)

A roads corporation might wish to exclude, from the 42,000 miles of roads they own and manage, a repeat-offending drunk driver who has already killed two and injured two more. They own those roads. They can decide to whom to sell transponders.

Expulsion, exclusion, and banishment are time-tested mechanisms for getting rid of people whose uncivilized behavior makes their presence untenable.

In addition to improving the lives of those freed from the burden of dealing with psychos, the risk of banishment also provides an effective deterrent: We are so ultra-social—we need each other so much—that people on the margins are more compelled to behave themselves if the threat of exclusion from the tribe looms large enough.

Maybe a “country” run by a private company promises a crime-free lifestyle as a part of its offering. Rent or lease here, and enjoy clean, crime-free streets. They pre-screen prospective residents, and then they put up a wall and check IDs at the gates. Creepy guests are expelled, and known criminals are simply not allowed in. Ever. And the people who want to live peacefully under this arrangement choose it willingly.

There are some who are so addled by our ultra-social nature, and by the last 225 years of living under the modern nation-state, that this concept sounds foreign, unfair, or even wicked.

But why?

Why must decent people be forced to live next to thugs? Why must productive people be forced to subsidize wastrels?

Why can’t people choose with whom to associate? Why must we violate the human right of consent and force people to live among psychopaths and people for whom the Seven Deadly Sins is an instruction manual?

In a world of consensual order, you would not have to. And as we progressively move into that world, more and more properties and polities are going to arise that simply exclude the bad apples.

The marginal apples will realize that it is in their best interests to behave.

The psychos will be pushed further and further out into the wasteland.

And what the heck is wrong with any of that?

The inspiration to write this article came, in part, from a comment-thread conversation yesterday in which I said,

This whole notion that we must find collective solutions that take everyone and everything into account, and build societies that must perpetually be lowered to the lowest common denominator, is pathological.

Those who are incapable of proper behavior can pound sand, poke berries up their noses, or peter out and remove themselves from the gene pool. I do not care. Build a wall and keep 'em out.

After having written this more formal exploration, I see no reason to alter that statement.

Thank you to Terry Freeman, Jonathan Ramsay, and others for discussions that helped inspire today’s post.