Freedom and crime are linked as indivisibly as...

A further development to the recent bootlicker post is the curiously symbiotic relationship between governments and crime. 

For example, here are two quotes about the endemic nature of crime, one from nineteenth century philosopher Herbert Spencer, one from twentieth century Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

Governments supposedly aim to protect us from crime, but they also invent reams of new crimes for reasons Spencer understood 175 years ago.

Let men learn that a legislature is not "our God upon earth," though, by the authority they ascribe to it and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is, at the best, borrowed.

Nay, indeed, have we not seen that government is essentially immoral? Is it not the offspring of evil, bearing about it all the marks of its parentage? Does it not exist because crime exists? Is it not strong, or, as we say, despotic, when crime is great? Is there not more liberty—that is, less government—as crime diminishes? And must not government cease when crime ceases, for very lack of objects on which to perform its function?

Herbert Spencer - The Right To Ignore The State (1851)


Governments are not viscerally opposed to crime, they prefer moral boundaries to be blurred and as Spencer suggested, endemic crime gives them a permanent reason for being there.

Yevgeny Zamyatin took this further in his dystopian novel WE, where he links reduced crime to reduced freedom, offering any governing class the opportunity to invent crimes forever in pursuit of totalitarian rule. This is the Fabian approach of course, step by step with bootlickers supporting each step.


Freedom and crime are linked as indivisibly as... well, as the motion of the aero and its speed: when its speed equals zero, it does not move; when man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

Yevgeny Zamyatin - WE (1921)

Spencer’s Puzzle

In 1857, Herbert Spencer published an essay called The Ultimate Laws of Physiology, later in the same year re-published as Transcendental Physiology. This was two years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but it was Spencer who came up with the phrase survival of the fittest. 

Although he knew about heredity, in his 1857 essay Spencer reflected the science of his day by admitting that he could not begin to understand how a fertilised ovum could grow into the complexity of an adult.


The capacity possessed by an unorganized germ of unfolding into a complex adult which repeats ancestral traits in minute details, and that even when it has been placed in conditions unlike those of its ancestors, is a capacity impossible for us to understand. That a microscopic portion of seemingly structureless matter should embody an influence of such kind, that the resulting man will in fifty years after become gouty or insane, is a truth which would be incredible were it not daily illustrated.

Herbert Spencer - Transcendental Physiology (1857)


Today, Spencer’s impossible puzzle is apparently solved quite easily in general conversation by words such as ‘genes’ or an acronym such as ‘DNA’. However, going no further than this would be to base the solution on a few words, a solution which doesn’t necessarily go much deeper than knowing how to use those words in conversations.

We could go on to suggest that Spencer did at least understand how baffling heredity is, whereas someone today using the word ‘gene’ might possess no more knowledge of heredity than Spencer and possibly less.

It highlights a problem where limited use of the correct technical language in social contexts may have only a superficial connection with what we usually refer to as ‘knowledge’. Even worse, language is frequently used to evade the pursuit of knowledge in favour of fashionable ideas. The evasion can be so successful that those drawn from the real world into the world of wordsmiths cannot tell the difference. Politicians know this.

Looping back to Spencer’s frustration with his apparently impossible problem, there was a time when a general fascination with all aspects of the real world appeared to promise something of vast value. Unfortunately, we never quite grasped it as a permanent cultural gain. Today, we drift back towards that endless conflict with the unreal worlds of wordsmiths.

When crime ceases

Let men learn that a legislature is not "our God upon earth," though, by the authority they ascribe to it and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is, at the best, borrowed.

Nay, indeed, have we not seen that government is essentially immoral? Is it not the offspring of evil, bearing about it all the marks of its parentage? Does it not exist because crime exists? Is it not strong, or, as we say, despotic, when crime is great? Is there not more liberty—that is, less government—as crime diminishes? And must not government cease when crime ceases, for very lack of objects on which to perform its function?

Herbert Spencer - The Right To Ignore The State (1851)

Sometimes it is worth going back to period when the welfare state did not distort our view of government and how big it ought to be. Derby lad Herbert Spencer suggests here that bearing down on crime is what government is for. It has expanded mightily since his day, but it is worth noting that crime still looms large in what governments do.

In which case, as we become more law-abiding one might expect new crimes to be invented to keep this key function well fed. There is no need to point out that this is exactly what we see, but perhaps worth adding that if Spencer was right we will see it long into the future too.