What is our social contract?
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
—Mother Teresa
What makes any government a legitimate one? The social contract that it maintains.
You probably have an idea of the social contract in your mind already, and may have just never called it that before. It’s why many of us don’t break laws or harm others, even when we easily could. Most people have the opportunity to harm others for their own benefit regularly, and know it, but nonetheless refrain from doing so. Why?
In short, the idea is that we voluntarily give up some of our intrinsic rights in order to obtain the safety, security, convenience, and other benefits of living within a society.
Absolute freedom is the idea that someone can do “whatever I want, whenever and wherever I want” no matter the impact on people around them. Play loud music late into the night, speed up and down the street, urinate in public, burn garbage, build a tall, unstable structure that overhangs your neighbor’s residence, dine’n dash, be violent toward other people. Freedom!
But if you’re living in proximity to other people, what you want may conflict with what they want. Your rights conflict with theirs. For a simple, benign example, imagine they have a garden, and as their produce ripens, you start to want some fruits (and vegetables) of their labor. In an “I do what I want” world of complete freedom, you would just take them. Maybe you’re bigger than them, maybe you’re sneaky, maybe they just aren’t home, it doesn’t particularly matter how. But you grab them, and now you have garden produce, and they don’t.
In our modern society, of course, that would be considered theft, and probably trespassing, too. We’ve laid out parts of our social contract in laws, and we enforce them when they’re broken.
However, in the absence of a law’s enforcement, what keeps us from breaking the social contract?
In this scenario, you do go steal your neighbor’s fruits and vegetables. You don’t think your neighbor saw you, but you can’t be sure. Putting the produce in storage, now you worry that the neighbor, or someone else, might come try to steal the stuff you have, the same way you did. Why wouldn’t they?
You can’t trust anyone, so you start setting up security measures; installing extra locks, buying cameras, and even installing booby traps (illegal now, but in an “I do what I want” world, anything goes). Is the hypervigilance starting to sound exhausting, expensive, dangerous and paranoia-inducing? That’s what early humans started thinking, too.
So instead of just doing anything they wanted anytime, they started to come to social agreements. They agreed on what ownership meant. They drew property lines. They bartered for the things they wanted. Neighbors agreed to look after each other’s properties cooperatively, rather than fight and take from each other. As a successful community grows, a village or town might hire a guard or sheriff to protect their safety and property collectively, and run off those who are anti-social. As societies grow, their contracts become more complex, and are often formalized into laws. Eventually, people agree on a currency to enable purchasing things, even from strangers, and so governments can collect taxes. Police forces are created to enforce the laws of a city, state, or nation.
The social contract can no longer be avoided, it’s mandatory. First come basic things like criminal laws. They stop the antisocial from engaging in behavior almost everyone is against, like theft, violence, and abuse. Then come things like traffic regulations for safe and orderly travel and food safety regulations for public health. If a governing body has such concerns, it creates a military to ensure security against invaders. As complexity builds, you start to get things like hunting laws to preserve game for the future and antitrust and labor laws to prevent economic abuse. Eventually, many civilizations have instituted the use of taxes for public education and social safety net programs to ensure opportunity and prevent desperation, which can lead to increased crime.
Individual freedoms are limited by all of this, but each person gets something out of the agreement as well. It might be as simple as home security and freedom of travel, but business owners get a secure banking system, a stable country, and a baseline educated workforce to run their business, too.
Unfortunately, the social contract doesn’t always build upward to rising levels of complexity. It can break down far beyond the occasional criminal act.
The social contract begins to fray when too many people no longer feel served by it. Typically, this means the people without the power in the system; the poor, working class, youth, and minorities.
They begin to feel that too many of their freedoms are being taken away, and the security–physical or economic–that they receive in return isn’t good enough. Perhaps they feel their concerns for the future aren’t being heard by leadership. In some cases, they simply haven’t had enough to eat. This, in turn, begins to lead to crime, corruption, and chaos as people begin to remake their personal social contract to best provide for themselves and their future.
There are generally two directions societies have moved if they find themselves at that point, where I think we are. Either the existing power structure can begin enforcing itself through increased policing and violence, or the social contract can be reformed to serve more people again.
For the record, I prefer the less violent of the two options.
