Freedom with a dose of chaos is better than order at the cost of tyranny

The trick is achieving enough order through freedom that chaos doesn't plunge us into tyranny.

When I was a kid, I went outside to play sports with my friends nearly every day. We mostly played baseball or softball on the street corner. It was a traditional city street intersection with four sewer caps, one on each corner. Those were our four bases.

I was a leader in the neighborhood. I planned sporting events, recruited other kids to participate, and organized teams. I even kept statistics. Other kids looked up to me and generally deferred to my decisions. One day there was a dispute over a call on a play. I disagreed with another kid. He maintained his point of view and disagreed with me.  My friend Chuck, the coach of the other team, declared, "Eric said…!” At that moment I realized my calls and decisions generally went unquestioned and it began to bother me that my word was being enforced as law.

So, I made it a point to tell the other kids that something isn’t true just because I say so. This is a self-evident truth - something does not become true just because someone says so and something can be true regardless of whether anyone recognizes it as such. I made that point because it was the truth - not that it was true because I said it :) I wanted everyone to feel they had a right to express what they believed to be true, even if it contradicted what I believed to be true.

That opened the doors of chaos right open. Other kids began quoting me to myself. "Just because you say it, doesn't make it true!" There was open rebellion against my leadership, and I was the one who started it. Things became a little more chaotic than normal but at least people felt free to argue their point of view. We didn’t have umpires. So, instead of always having the final word myself, I developed a system that decentralized and distributed decision-making when there was a dispute over a play.

I see a lesson about freedom and democracy in that experience. Every person should be able to speak their mind. Every person should be able to weigh in on a question that affects them personally. “No taxation without representation,” for example. No one person should ever lord it over all others. But freedom can have a cost. Sometimes that cost is a little chaos.

Better freedom with a dose of chaos than order at the cost of tyranny. But how do we keep chaos from getting so far out of control that its inevitable end is tyranny? The more our systems empower people to create order and achieve success through their free decisions, the better.