There’s one rule that underpins everything: never initiate violence against others. We learn it as small children. You knew — or you were taught — that it would be wrong to walk up to another kid on the playground and punch him.
We learned the same lesson about taking what wasn’t ours, whether it was a toy or lunch money. Even if I recruited a few friends and we all agreed it would be fine to hang the richest kid on the playground upside down by his ankles until the change fell out of his pockets, everybody knew that was wrong too.
This principle has a name — “human respect” — though I didn’t coin it. I borrowed it from the Foundation for Harmony and Prosperity, which puts adulthood’s version of the same childhood lesson this way: “I will neither initiate violence against others, nor will I diminish the wealth of others through theft, fraud, or destruction of their property.”
Human respect starts from the premise that we’re equal. Someone might have more money, a fancier diploma, or some incredible bloodline — none of that makes him better than you or me. He might be stronger, faster, better looking. None of that buys him the authority, by allowance or by popular vote, to initiate violence against you.
Human respect also means recognizing each person’s autonomy — never disrupting someone’s pursuit of happiness. And here’s the part that’s easy to say and hard to live by: that rule doesn’t bend even when we’re convinced the disruption would make someone happier.
Picture the playground again. A kid spots a purse on a bench, goes through it, and pockets twenty dollars. Does that violate human respect? Obviously. It might make the thief happier for an afternoon, but it makes the purse’s owner poorer and more afraid.
What if he’s stealing to feed a starving family? The urgency is real, and the impulse to act is human. Yet the theft still initiates force against someone. The act may buy a night’s food, but it does not create a durable solution; it simply shifts the burden and hardwires violence as acceptable shortcut. The harder path — asking, organizing, working, or appealing to the goodness of other humans — is slower and less dramatic; it might take several rejections before someone offers a “yes,” but it is the only path that does not require violating someone else’s person or property and reducing happiness.
Now suppose every parent in the neighborhood holds a vote and decides, by majority, that stealing to feed the hungry is fine as long as it’s organized. Does that change anything? No. A vote might seem like a way to launder away the impurity of the action. But passing a law or signing an edict doesn’t hold in abeyance the underlying principle. If you’re using force to make yourself or someone else happier, you’re doing it wrong, and a permission slip signed by 51 percent of the people in the room doesn’t make it right.
Someone here, no doubt, will insist that I cannot mean that every tax or every government program is identical to playground theft. It will be argued that societies do have genuine interests that cannot be fully met through voluntary means. I will come back to this in future essays because it is important to do so. I’ll summarize for now that I believe that we’ve resorted to violence in too many cases without holding fast to or even considering the principle of the playground, that of human respect. Often, the initiation of violence is our go-to solution, and the question isn’t “shall we initiate the violence?” but rather “how do we initiate violence, and who should suffer the most?”
Indeed, because we are so quick to resort to violence as condoned by law, it leaves open-ended claims on other people’s lives, property, and happiness simply because a majority might vote for it.
Notice, too, that you don’t have to actually be robbed to feel the loss. The mere threat of theft, fraud, or force is enough to shrink your happiness before anything happens.
That’s the unease running through public life right now. At any moment, a decision made in a legislature or an agency could shrink your income, raise your costs, or put your property at risk. Whether the policy ever gets enacted is one question. But the mere possibility of it is already extracting a cost in peace of mind.
Protecting people’s happiness has to come first, then. Respect means recognizing that everyone is chasing it in their own way — and that however much I might want more money, more land, or something that belongs to someone else, I don’t get to take it by force; and a vote for someone else to take it for me is still force. I have to find another way.
Once we connect the pieces — peace, love, human respect — into an immutable policy framework, we arrive at compassion, connection, and community, without injuring anyone to get there.
We’ve grown comfortable letting systems — a majority vote, for instance — stand in for right and wrong. But a vote doesn’t make an outcome moral; it just makes it convenient, and convenience has a cost: it quietly shrinks our humanity.
Take the initiation of violence off the table, and you’re forced to get creative — which humans have been doing for as long as we’ve existed. Long before governments got in the business of redistributing wealth by force, people fed the hungry and cared for the sick through networks built entirely on consent.
In America, this started organically and then formalized into mutual aid societies, civic clubs, churches, and charities — all of it providing real help within the communities that sustained them.
Were these systems perfect? Of course not, but nor is a government program that derives its authority from force. Both voluntary systems and government systems suffer under pressure, be it catastrophic scale, lack of funding, logistical challenges, structures that miss some while providing disproportionate aid to others, and so on.
The difference is that one system is built with the initiation of violence and the other depends entirely on voluntary participation. The question I’ll pose to you is: have we leaned too far into coercion, force, and violence, as a means to an end? Can we recover and expand the peaceful and loving ways we used to care about one another?
So here’s the choice: keep building a system that runs on the initiation of violence to meet our needs and our neighbors’, or go back to what we knew on the playground and hold the line on human respect. The more we treat force as the ordinary tool for achieving social goals, the more we train ourselves to see other people as obstacles or resources rather than as equals. The more we insist on finding non-coercive paths — even when they are slower or less complete — the more we build our own compassion, connection, and community.
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