There is a view that the only essential condition for achieving freedom of activity, agreement, and association is the creation of significant costs for criminals. Allegedly, it is sufficient that any harm inevitably requires compensation, and that everyone owns weapons, which would make attacks unprofitable (do not think that we are against gun ownership – it is useful for evolutionary selection, but right now we are talking about something else). In such a case, even if everyone were a psychopath, significant violence would not arise in practice. Moreover, some might say that aggressiveness is even necessary for a free person, for example, to easily kill for any encroachments upon oneself and to carry out violent revenge (on the principle of “an eye for an eye”). But we can easily dispute this position and prove why freedom is possible only in a society of peaceful people.
First, it would be foolish to believe that people always act rationally and accurately assess benefits and risks. Even in societies where fingers and hands were cut off for theft, thieves did not disappear completely. This is even more true for psychopathic individuals. As research shows, they concentrate too heavily on their goals, missing important details. For example, in a task where they had to navigate a maze by manipulating levers and avoiding those that delivered painful electric shocks, they handled the first condition well, but were worse than ordinary people at the second. In gambling, they were poor at learning long-term strategies; it was important for them to quickly hit a huge win, even at the risk of putting themselves in the negative. Likewise, psychopathic pilots in World War II would easily chase an enemy, forgetting to monitor fuel, the position of other aircraft, and other factors critical for victory.
Understanding this, would anyone still think that psychopathic individuals can be reasoned with or intimidated enough to ensure they definitely do not commit violence, do not organize criminal gangs, or even avoid trying to forcibly subjugate everyone and create their own power in a society where none exists? Let us not forget that current states arose precisely through the violent subjugation of people. And striving for the position of a “stationary” bandit, “nomadic” bandits ignored the risk of death at the hands of defenders and their competitors.
Second, there are many ways to cause harm to people without direct violence. Various kinds of manipulations, including gossip, blackmail, threats, pitting people against each other, provoking a hostile reaction (to make you look unstable to others), wearing someone down, psychological and economic violence, etc., which are often used by psychopaths in the pursuit of their own benefit. It will be impossible to write deterrent factors and punishments for all such scenarios. This means that the more psychopathic individuals there are around, the more such manipulations will be applied to you personally, and instead of productive activity, you will spend all your time defending yourself from attempts to walk all over you. Also, psychopathic individuals are prone to sabotaging collective work for personal gain.
Now imagine the opposite situation – psychopathic individuals are absent or negligibly few. In such a society, freedom of relationships would occur instantly and without additional requirements. At the same time, in a society of psychopaths, one could likely expect something similar to what is currently happening in Haiti or the scenario of the movie “New World,” where rapists sent to live on an island organized a mass slaughter, and at some point, a small portion of them even forcibly subjugated all the others and monopolized the possession of resources. And if you would not want to participate daily in a war of all against all in a “free” society, you should first think about eradicating such a pathology as the dysfunction of the violence inhibition mechanism, which makes some people psychopathically predisposed and capable of easily causing harm to other people.
