With the ability to project one's influence further than ever before with the power of the internet, people are freer than ever to tell me how the hell I should behave, what I should believe in, who I should vote for, and why they are right (and often infallible). Everybody deep down is a control freak. Control is a deep craving that is never satisfied. Why control? Because life is so much easier when everyone follows your wishes.
There are lots of reasons to want to control things, but today, I'm going to focus on people wanting to control other people. More specifically, why controlling other people is waste of time unless you have sufficient firepower to back up your coercion.
First, let us define a certain group of people. We'll call them bad actors. Bad actors are people that you want to control because they are acting against your specific interests or wishes. Taking an egocentric position, you are the hero of the story and the good guy and thus they are the bad guy (thus the name bad actor). Ignore the fact we live in a non-binary world where everyone is a good actor and bad actor to others. We are narrowing our prospective to a single protagonist for now.
So, should we control bad actors? There are cases where controlling bad actors seems like an appealing thing to do. Most rational people would argue an action like looting is a bad action. It makes the price of goods go up and discourages local entrepreneurs that run those businesses. It makes sense that we should try to control these looters.
But lets say that some looters won't listen to reason. Let's say they are committed to being a bad actor. They will loot until they can loot and break things no more. How do we control such a situation? Well, we introduce force. We'll define force as the active action of denying a person of getting something that they want. Looters want to loot. Force stops the looters. Who are the agents of force in our society? The police and the military.
So, in order to stop bad actors, we need to apply force to stop them. This could start off with a threat, but can easily escalate to physical coercion or violence. The most extreme application of force to a single human being is to kill them, thus making one's control over them absolute in that they now have no agency to act in opposition to one's own wishes. But let's try to avoid that last one as that has very significant moral considerations. Although, if you don't believe in morals (that is some framework for determining appropriate behavior), we don't have a problem. Control as you please (and can get away with).
So, the question becomes how do we properly use force to control those that oppose our wishes? Some would argue that force is only acceptable in cases of self-defense. Others would argue that force is necessary in order to maintain order and enforce the laws and rules of a society. In the first case, control is typically minimal, although there is a lot of room to liberally argue what constitutes as being harm worthy of triggering self-defense. Shooting a kid in the head from stealing a candy bar from your store would be something perhaps on one extreme of the spectrum of self-defense. In the second case, society itself is to be protected from bad actors regardless of whether they are harming any individual or not. If they threaten the authority of society by breaking the rules, then they must be punished accordingly (There is some flexibility here too).
Now that we have some ways to control people and have considered different paths to addressing when to control people, we should ask ourselves to what extent it is reasonable. While it is easy to defend force and attempting to control others when you personally are in danger, it is harder to justify so when control is a preference and not a necessity. Should I care about the looter if the looter does not affect me? It depends on what the implications are on letting the looter loot. It could encourage more looting or maybe things de-escalate. Given that "bad-actor" looters want to loot, maybe I should be okay with others using force on my behalf. I don't want to encourage looting near my neighborhood.
On the other hand, if we apply too much force and apply it to the wrong people it makes things worse. If not everyone is a looter and rather most people are peaceful protesters, than the force justified to control looters may not be justified across the board. It also makes it harder when those delegated to use the force are themselves bad actors. Because who controls them?
Thus, we see the issue of control. Because not all control is done with good intentions. Because not all control with good intentions achieves desirable results. Because not all control with good intentions that achieves desirable results is morally acceptable. One can argue that looters fall in the first camp, protesters fall in the second camp, and police fall in the third camp in some situations. All parties have their bad actors and controlling them can require more force than members of those parties are willing to use (or should use). It really kind of sucks. Control is not the solution, but a means of resolution given conflict. The preferable choice is to avoid conflict in the first place. That way, we don't have to worry about control. People will then act in ways that we can tolerate while still getting what they themselves want.
Unfortunately, conflict prevention is hard with human beings. Conflict prevention is very hard for human beings with very short-term, narrow-minded thinking. Because those types of people are the types that don't care about conflict prevention and are happy to use force as a means of implementing control. The best way of avoiding these people (and in general, human nature) is to create systems that naturally avoid conflict. This is the next stage in governance. For now, we deal with central governance, where the primary goal is conflict resolution (via force), often in favor of those with the most "stake" in that governance system.
