Law, Order, Anarchy etc.

Boris Johnson on ID cards:

There in a nutshell, I thought, you had the eternal tension at the heart of conservatism, between the desire for liberty and the desire for order, and, in the case of ID cards, the frail cockade of freedom has been emphatically crushed by the giant descending rump of matronly authority.

My teacher Charles Rowley would expand on that. He advocates a distinction between two seperate spectra of political philosophy. The first is the balance between liberty and oppression, usually manifested in the individual's fight against the state. This is the struggle best captured by John Locke's works: the state of nature includes natural rights, and the weak require government to protect their property. It would be madness to give an agency that intends to violate your rights, the task of protecting them and hence only a minimal government is desired.

The second spectrum is between anarchy and order, a conundrum devised by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathon. In the jungle, fear of anarchy leads to desire for order.

The desire for both liberty and order is therefore difficult, and compressing these two concepts together is the fundamental problem in America today. They are so scared, they have shifted from a concern for liberty, to a fear of anarchy. And less anarchy leads to an order called leviathan: an authoritarian  ogre.