"Things do not get better by being left alone"
- Sir Winston Churchill
In political science, almost all theories which advocate the right to democracy have specified that, no matter how minimal the intervention of the government into society, there will be no absolute democracy. In other words, if people are given the right to do everything they desire, they will commit stealing, rioting, murdering, raping and other crimes with impunity and threaten the freedom as well as the welfare of others. In order to protect the rights of the whole community, governments and their coercive measures are always needed. This example is an excellent demonstration of the fact that, things usually move towards undesirable states when left alone by it supervisors.
When children are left alone by their parents, they will be taught neither the skills necessary for survival nor the good personalities that ensure their success in life, such as tolerance, courage and diligence. On a larger scale, consider an entire continent isolated, Africa. While UN and other principal organizations stood watching and did nothing, Africa ushered in violence, ignorance, ill-nourishment and corruption. Because no one thought Africa will ever change for the better, Africa was simply ‘left alone’ and will forever be the poorest part of the world.
One perfect example of how things stay healthily when carefully supervised is the capitalism economy that has been standing strong for nearly five centuries. Capitalist governments consider the market capable of stabilizing itself through the law of supply and demand, and thus stabilizing society on the whole. However, as the market operates strictly to the law, it fluctuates in an unending series of shortages and abundances of supply. These shortages and abundances, if pushed to the extremes, will destroy the economy; the 1929 – 1933 Great Depression is an example. That is when the government comes in with stimulus packages and strict reform policies. Though stable and highly competitive, the market economy must never be left to itself, or else it will be disaster.
History taught us that if the US had considered the Nazis completely Europe’s problem, or in another scenario, had stood hesitantly while fascism subjugated the whole world by continents, the Allies would not have been formed and World War II would not have turned out to be the way we learn about it today (both scenarios explored in the novel The Man in The High Castle by Philip K. Dick). And after all these examples presented above, let us come to a general observation that: every system (e.g. economies, societies, ecological systems) works in an equilibrium, in which the components connected and depend on each other to function smoothly, like clockwork. Often, some components can work themselves into undesirable, extreme states and thus damage the equilibrium, threatening the system. This process is not reversible, so damage left unchecked will be permanent and will cause the system’s downfall. As Sir Winston Churchill have said, ‘Things do not get better by being left alone’.
