Putting Compulsion in its Place

Can we accelerate our journey towards consent-based governance, fist in palm?

The key to making people’s lives better is knowing when coercion will work and when it would be best to leave people alone to cooperate. Given the complicated nature of human life, it should come as no surprise that this is not a simple, binary choice.
- James Harrigan and Antony Davies, from Cooperation and Coercion

In Chinese martial arts, Bao Quan Li means ‘fist wrapping rite.’ Perhaps you have seen two fighters salute one another in their practice. Each stands up straight, clenches his right fist, and the four left fingers make a plane. Then, each places the two hands in front of his chest before wrapping the fist tight. 

Bao Quan Li is a gesture that symbolizes discipline and restraint. Specifically, each of the four fingers of the left hand represents virtue, wisdom, health, and art, respectively. The bent thumb represents humility. The right hand, balled tight into a fist, represents power and action potential. When one brings these together, they represent rigorous practice and the responsible use of force.

Ponder this centuries-old symbolism as you consider the following, specifically about how societies change or constitute themselves: There are only two ways to get another to do what you want him to do--compulsion and persuasion.

There is no other way.

You can get someone to do something through lying or trickery, but these are just vicious forms of persuasion. You can calmly and gently inform someone that you have a gun, so they must open the till, but that’s just polite compulsion. 

In other words, one is left free to make her own decisions, or she is not. The world runs on compulsion and persuasion, and the preponderance of either in a society shapes it utterly. 

Compulsion

When you compel someone to do something, you threaten him with violence. Do it or else. The or else is never pleasant. Indeed, it causes suffering. Yet, two entire magisteria are organized around these threats, although we don’t always think of them as so constituted. The first magisterium is crime, which is intuitive because it is the domain of individuals making others worse off through some injury. Most of us wish to avoid those who would injure us, as criminals threaten our bodies, property, or reputations. The second magisterium, though, is politics, which is less intuitive. What do elections and legislatures have to do with compulsion?

Well, everything.

Whenever we refer to politics, we usually think of strategic games in which certain people jockey to access power and control. Ultimately, though, power and control are asserted through violent means. Voting supplies the illusion that each of us has a piece of that power. But your vote is just a teardrop in the ocean, which is why the tide never seems to turn.

By being born on a particular patch of soil, a special group of people gets to tell you what you can and cannot do. Others are paid enforcers. The rest obey, or else. If you disagree, the enforcers will come with guns and take you to prison. That means politics is more or less a complicated zero-sum game that cannot exist without the threat of violence. 

It is a mistake to view crime and politics as non-overlapping magisteria, but we shouldn’t dwell on matters too long. We might come to realize that politics is little more than a vast criminal enterprise that has legitimized itself. How are state authorities appreciably different from a mafia? Mafiosos divide the spoils among the family. Favor-seekers divide the spoils among those bidding in the lobby.

Most folks don’t think of things this way. Inured as they are to state power figuring so comprehensively into their lives, they either conclude it has to be this way or that there is nothing they can do. People put up with authority as a Jew puts up with Christmas carols in November. 

What can you do?

Subconsciously, people need to think of government as being staffed with angels who have their best interests at heart. Even if too few come to see politics as a protection racket wrapped in pomp and circumstance, perhaps we can at least agree there is plenty of overlap between crime and politics.

Persuasion

When you persuade someone, you appeal either to his sense of right, or to his interests, or both. Two distinct magisteria arise from this approach. When you appeal to someone’s sense of what’s right or good, we call that morality. When you appeal to what you think she might like, we call that marketing. Morality and markets run on persuasion. Their watchword is ought. 

You ought to abstain from stealing. (Morality)
You ought to buy that book. (Markets)

With morality, you’re trying to guide your counterpart into a sense of what is right and wrong, so he acts accordingly. In markets, you endeavor to show a customer that something is desirable so he’ll come to desire it and then act based on that desire. At no point are you making any threats. 

Ought respects choice. Or else does not.

If one were playing semantic games, he might argue that threatening violence is just an unpleasant form of persuasion. But the point at which a decision-maker realizes his choice is between injury or acquiescence, she knows very well she’s being compelled.

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Today we live in a regime of systematic compulsion supervised with a digital panopticon. But should we? Remember the dead religion Manichaeism, with its stark understanding of light and dark, good and evil. One might conclude from the discussion to this point that we’re Manichaean, that is, that compulsion is universally bad, and persuasion is universally good, at least as a means of getting someone to do something. After all, our mission is to realize the Consensual Society.

To address these concerns adequately, we must strike a position between the absolute and the arbitrary. 

An extreme position is that compulsion is never justifiable. Yet hardly anyone would assent to such a view. Someone has to make children brush their teeth and stay out of traffic. Someone has to compel contract signatories to honor their commitments. And we certainly have to defend ourselves from those who would harm us. So if there is any room for compulsion in the Consensual Society, we have to be careful to circumscribe it, as the wrapped fist.

An arbitrary position might be that compulsion is justifiable relative to the interests of the stronger (might makes right) or relative to some culture’s norms (cultural relativism). A brutal dictator claims everything he utters is God’s will, and his people must obey his commands. Faraway people engage in genital mutilation because of various totems and taboos in their society. A cabal of mullahs decides homosexual acts shall be punishable by death. And in your more enlightened society, some will argue authorities should compel people for the ‘common good.’ 

Between the absolute and the arbitrary, we want to find a sweet spot that puts compulsion in its place. We can start by proscribing the initiation of violence (or threat of violence) against those who have injured no one. People can and should be allowed to opt into different systems of association that constrain their choices and place obligations on them. The rest is conflict resolution. While these systems might require some internal compulsion, there are reasonable limits.

Consider that many people are willing to live in homeowners associations (HOAs), which are a form of multi-lateral contract. Maybe they value the manicured lawns and the brick facades more than they value being able to paint their homes neon purple and decorate their yards with plastic flamingos. But the HOA is not for everyone. And neither is the democratic republic with its ballooning military and grotesque transfer state. Most of us have been inculcated with a steady diet of indoctrination about this form of government. (Yet we are starved for adequate justification.)

Maybe it’s the best we’ve got, but we can do better.

For thousands of years, most of the world has lived under some form of military dictatorship. When Thomas Hobbes came along and told us why he thought that was a good idea, we bought it. And most still do to some degree. Sure, Locke and Montesquieu came along with their checks, balances, and natural rights, but that only replaced kingly caprice with special-interest capture. Throw in a couple of election spectacles, et voila, you’ve got a more tolerable form of serfdom.

Monstrous Moral Hybrids

In Systems of Survival, urbanist Jane Jacobs explores the compulsion and persuasion paradigms. Jacobs explains what she regards as two fundamental survival strategies, which she calls “Guardian Syndrome” and “Commercial Syndrome.” Either people can take what they need from other people through the threat of violence, or they can produce and exchange what they have to get what they need. Each approach comes along with a cluster of associated values. The raiders of Guardian Syndrome tend to express values, such as loyalty and pecking order, but shun persuasion’s sweet talk. The traders of Commercial Syndrome tend to value hard work and inventiveness but are hesitant to threaten violence. 

A curious thing happens when the syndromes are combined. Jacobs calls these “monstrous moral hybrids.” What foul offspring slinks from the coital bed of business and government?

• Pharmaceutical corporations and regulatory agencies collude to prevent data transparency and product liability while authorities mandate the company’s experimental products;

• Military contractors whose revenues are made almost entirely of taxpayer largesse, giving rise to the military-industrial complex;

• Financial institutions designated ‘too big to fail’ reap massive profits in good times but receive heavy subsidies in bad times and benefit first from the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing.  

Monstrous moral hybrids comprise a large portion of the world’s economy.

Despite such unholy alliances, humanity has slowly moved away from compulsion as a primary means of social organization and change. The glacial pace is partly due to the inertia of these hybrid legacy systems. Our quiet failures of imagination also bias us to the status quo. Here, though, I want to demonstrate another possibility, struggling to exist and exert itself: The way of consent is the way of liberation. The path of persuasion is the way to flourishing. 

Can we accelerate our journey towards persuasion-based governance, fist in palm?