Patterns of Force

When I was a kid, my friends and I constantly played in the woods surrounding our neighborhood. I have no idea who the legal owner of the land was- perhaps the government, perhaps an oil company- but for us, it was a perfect state of nature. Sans adults, we had no imposed rules or rights, and determining who had a right to go where was left entirely to us.

Typically the sheer size of the forest precluded any conflict, but sometimes trouble arose. Most commonly, a kid or a group of kids would construct an ersatz clubhouse out of fallen branches and small felled trees and then go home for the day. At some later date, other kids would find and use it, often improving it, and then the builders would return, seeking to drive the interlopers out.

How were these conflicts resolved? Did we resort to Coasean bargaining? Did we attempt to quantify how much labor had been mixed and by whom? Were discourse ethics involved?

No, of course not. We beat the tar out of each other, and whoever won, won the clubhouse. The only use considerations of fairness and justice had was convincing other kids to help or at least to remain uninvolved.

Over time, of course, the violence became less frequent. It was well known who could beat up whom, and actual fighting was minimized. A desire to have friends kept the bigger kids from constantly lording it over the smaller, but when conflicts arose, established patterns of force- known outcomes from past encounters- as often as not settled the conflict without actual violence.

These patterns of force created "rights." We were kids in a neighborhood in flux, so no lasting, stable pattern emerged; new kids came and were unknown quantities, we grew and sought to test our new strength against our old enemies, old friendships broke down and new ones were formed. Violence was therefore never comprehensively delegitimized; no broadly accepted pattern of force held sway.

On a civilizational scale, patterns of force become much more ingrained and are much more enduring. The medieval lord did not have to menace his serfs on horseback in order to extract his rents; the fact that his ancestors had done so so effectively was enough to establish the lord's "right" to the rents. I don't have to terrorize my neighbors in person or through the proxy of the police to keep them off my lawn; from childhood we are taught not to trespass. A factory owner typically need not hire armed guards to keep his employees from seizing the factory; the same childhood instruction against theft and trespass, as well as the example of past worker insurrections swiftly crushed make a demonstration of force unnecessary.

I have deliberately chosen three examples of "rights," one generally held to be illegitimate, the next legitimate, and the last a point of dispute, in order to demonstrate that all rights find their origin in force. Rights may be conceived of as crystallized patterns of force. Those that hold in a given society are typically given a veneer of philosophical justification; thus, we find the descendents of the warlords of Late Antiquity justifying their dominion over the serfs with discourses on the great chain of being while modern day property owners discuss Lockean homesteading. Both are equally mythical and are, to nonbelievers, transparently post hoc justifications for existing states of affairs, for established patterns of force.

Understanding rights as patterns of force both weakens and strengthens the case for existing rights. Seeing them as based on force, whether veiled or unveiled, opens the possibility of altering them to attain better results by whatever standard one chooses to adopt. Understanding rights as patterns of force also makes clear, however, that altering current arrangements is difficult, if not impossible, without violence. All rights are established through violence. Establishing new ones and abolishing old ones requires at least the threat of further violence.