"In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system"
About this Quote
It’s the “alas” that gives the game away: Amiel isn’t neutrally observing a statistic so much as prodding a liberal complacency that treats freedom as an unqualified social upgrade. The line is built to be annoying on purpose. It concedes what many democrats would rather hand-wave away - that open societies can look messier, noisier, less “orderly” - and then forces the reader to sit with the discomfort of that trade-off.
The intent is double-edged. On one side, it punctures the authoritarian sales pitch that equates fewer visible crimes with a “better” society. Dictatorships often reduce recorded street crime the way they reduce recorded dissent: by intimidation, surveillance, and manipulating what counts as a reportable fact. On the other side, it needles libertarians and civil-rights maximalists with an inconvenient cost: constraints on state power can limit preemptive policing, expand due process, and tolerate marginal behavior that a police state would crush early. Freedom doesn’t just permit protest; it permits a certain amount of ordinary misbehavior.
The subtext is about optics and measurement. “Common crime” signals the petty, everyday offenses that become legible in a society where victims can speak, journalists can publish, and courts can’t simply disappear the accused. A dictatorship can boast “order” because it controls the narrative and the data. A free world, paradoxically, looks worse partly because it’s more honest about its own disorder.
Contextually, coming from a journalist steeped in late-20th-century arguments over law-and-order, welfare states, and “broken windows” politics, the quote is less a defense of dictatorship than a warning: if democracies can’t manage public safety, voters will be tempted by the counterfeit calm of coercion.
The intent is double-edged. On one side, it punctures the authoritarian sales pitch that equates fewer visible crimes with a “better” society. Dictatorships often reduce recorded street crime the way they reduce recorded dissent: by intimidation, surveillance, and manipulating what counts as a reportable fact. On the other side, it needles libertarians and civil-rights maximalists with an inconvenient cost: constraints on state power can limit preemptive policing, expand due process, and tolerate marginal behavior that a police state would crush early. Freedom doesn’t just permit protest; it permits a certain amount of ordinary misbehavior.
The subtext is about optics and measurement. “Common crime” signals the petty, everyday offenses that become legible in a society where victims can speak, journalists can publish, and courts can’t simply disappear the accused. A dictatorship can boast “order” because it controls the narrative and the data. A free world, paradoxically, looks worse partly because it’s more honest about its own disorder.
Contextually, coming from a journalist steeped in late-20th-century arguments over law-and-order, welfare states, and “broken windows” politics, the quote is less a defense of dictatorship than a warning: if democracies can’t manage public safety, voters will be tempted by the counterfeit calm of coercion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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