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Government, we are told is about control:
“Government, the political direction and control exercised over the actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities, societies, and states; direction of the affairs of a state, community, etc.; political administration: Government is necessary to the existence of civilized society.”[1]
While most people would agree with this definition it is not entirely accurate, since other institutions exercise control over peoples behavior through persuasion or various inducements. Most of the institutions that provide the benefits of civilization, such as corporations and other commercial entities, medical facilities, schools and so forth are quite distinct from government although they may be regulated and supported by it. The distinction is a simple one. A government, whatever its form, is the sole institution within any political entity that has the authority to determine how force or coercion may be applied legitimately.
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Other institutions that use force in the process of providing a product or a service do so because they are authorized by the government, as in the case of private police forces.
And why do citizens need to be controlled by force?
James Madison, in the Federalist No. 51, stated that “If men were angels no government would be necessary.” He meant that if humans were not, by nature, capable of violence and fraud, civilization could exist without a government. Madison presents this as a self-evident truth and certainly it is one that is seldom questioned. Most political discourse focuses on how governments ought to be structured without seriously questioning whether civilization might exist without the citizens being controlled by force.
It is certainly true that humans are capable of violence and fraud but under what boundary conditions do they resort to them? Observation of any human civilization shows that there are always a relatively small number of people that will never resort to violence and fraud and a equally small or perhaps even smaller number which will always prey upon their fellows, today these are called sociopaths.
Most humans living in a civilization will turn into predators only in desperation, in order to survive or to save their family but not merely for personal gain. Thus the better a civilization is at providing for the necessities of life, the smaller the problem of dealing with predatory humans becomes. The vast majority of people will behave in a manner that benefits them within the boundary conditions of the society where they find themselves.
If an intelligent, enterprising young man growing up in a blighted urban ghetto has a choice between a minimum wage job or maybe the possibility of great wealth by becoming a drug
dealer it is not unreasonable of him to choose the latter if he has a reasonable chance of getting away with it. Not because he is stupid, (many do get away with it,) or because he is evil but because the boundary conditions of his environment make it reasonable for him to take this course of action.
The question of boundary conditions is crucial to understanding how people behave or would behave under different boundary conditions. People look around them to find what is required to meet their needs. When they see what they want they devise a strategy to obtain it. What is available to meet their needs in a controlled environment is not the same as in a more open one.
The more unhealthy or stressed the boundary conditions the more people need to be controlled. The healthier they are – the less. And what are these boundary conditions? Nothing else than the same pillars of society we are redefining on the basis of a more profound knowledge of the hearts and minds of human beings.
So in a healthy, successful, society only a few people would actually need to be controlled. Let us posit that in New Atlantis “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit” would be the commonly held qualities,” exactly as envisioned by Francis Bacon. The rare vicious predator human or “bad seed” would be as rare as a mad dog and almost as easily dealt with.
Still, good people may differ in their sensibilities about how to handle even mad dogs so some means of finding consensus is needed. Here we find the root function that what “government” might be in a truly healthy society. It is a standards body that articulates a peoples sensibilities of how aberrant citizens who commit force or fraude are to be dealt with and publishes those standards so every knows them.
Standards bodies have been an important part of the technology world since Henry Ford invented the notion of standard parts. Since the advent of the open architecture of the original IBM personal computer in the early 1980s standards bodies have become an essential pillar of the high technology commerce, permitting companies to cooperate where it makes sense to cooperate and complete where that make sense. Everyone has benefited immensely, technology has gotten better and cheaper at an exponential rate.
The main thing about these standards is that they are not mandated by an authority, they are arrived at though consensus. The broader the consensus, the wider the adoption. The standards do not need to be enforced because they are so clearly in the best interests of everyone.
So in New Atlantis we will still have laws but law too is redefined. Laws are standards agreed upon by the ”public spirited citizens” (almost everybody) for how they should deal with force and fraud when perpetrated by the (very rare) malefactors.
And who will actually act in accordance with these standards to remove the predators? If a mad dog is terrorizing the neighborhood, people can hire a dog catcher. The point being that you do not need an institution that sucks up half the Gross National Product to deal with a few mentally deficient individuals.
That New Atlantis could truly function this way will seem hopelessly naive to all but confirmed Libertarians but that is because it is so alien to the current way of thinking, but as the Atlantean way of thinking is revealed it will make more and more sense. sense.
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