Knowledge And Decisions

Freedom here will refer to a social relationship among people — namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect. This prospective definition of force is essential to avoid such absurdities as concluding that armed robbery does not usually involve force. Force here is not used metaphorically, however, to refer to benefits so enticing as to make the decision a foregone conclusion. A special wariness is necessary in discussions of freedom, not only because of the inherent problems of the concept, but also because an Orwellian Newspeak has made it fashionable to describe the trade-off of freedom for other things as an expansion of “new freedoms” or of freedom in some “larger” sense. The incremental trade-off of freedom for other things is accepted by everyone except a pure anarchist. But the extent of this historic trade-off is too momentous an issue to be concealed or confused by pretty words.

Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force. Force used against murder, for example, includes not only such force as may be used by police intervening to prevent a murder, or to capture a murderer, but also force applied to innocent third parties who may be detained or subpoenaed as witnesses or forced by law to serve as jurors. It is not an absolute sacrifice of freedom nor an absolute prevention of murder. But it is simply an incremental trade-off at varying rates, and the question at any given point is how much more freedom are we prepared to sacrifice for how much prospect of reducing the murder rate — or how much more freedom are we going to demand at the cost of how many more lives of murder victims? Trade-offs involving freedom are often painful, if only because only other urgent needs are considered worthy of weighing and balancing with it.

The government is the general repository of force — whether that government be democratic, totalitarian, feudal, etc. Totalitarian governments, by definition, have no significant trade-offs of freedom left to consider, since freedom has already been sacrificed for some alternative consideration, whether rhetorical or material. Democratic governments are constantly weighing incremental trade-offs toward or away from freedom. Indeed, democracy itself is a consideration that is traded against freedom, and at one time this trade-off was both recognized and feared.⁷ Contemporary opinion often simply incorporates freedom into the very definition of democracy, so that a government that eliminates freedom is not “really” democratic. This trade-off, too, is much too important to be dealt with by verbal sleight of hand. To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped-for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process.

A lynch mob may be a more accurate expression of the majority will than a court of law — especially an appellate court of appointed judges — and yet lynch mobs are condemned and “law and order” upheld because certain freedoms are deemed more important than democracy. Democratic institutions will be defined here to mean institutions which carry out the popular will in its decisions — whether those decisions be wise or foolish, generous or oppressive. When the undemocratic governments of the Reconstruction era in the South were replaced by governments more responsive to the majority, the minority suffered oppression and terror on a scale seldom seen in modern civilization. Such residual protection as the black minority retained came largely from sources having little to do with political democracy — notably markets,⁸ morality,⁹ and appellate courts.¹⁰