Getting in the way as little as possible

A free society doesn’t start from believing that people will always make good decisions. That would be naive.

People make mistakes. We choose badly. We trust the wrong person. We get into businesses that fail. We defend ideas that we later find out were false. We act on incomplete information, with biases, with fear, with overconfidence and, sometimes, even against the evidence right in front of us.

Freedom doesn’t deny any of that.

It starts from a much humbler idea: if every person can be wrong, so can a government leader, a manager or a parent. And none of them, however intelligent, prepared or well-intentioned, can possess all the tacit, scattered, ever-changing knowledge that exists in the lives of the people they claim to decide for.

A government doesn’t know the particular reality of millions of families. A manager can’t grasp every detail of what the people on their team know and face. A parent can’t live a child’s experience from the inside either.

To claim otherwise is irrational.

The authoritarian ends up getting in the way

There is a kind of authority that believes its responsibility is to keep others from making mistakes. It decides for them. It tells them which path to take, which risks to avoid and what the right outcome should be. Since it usually does this with the intention of protecting, helping or guiding, it rarely recognizes itself as authoritarian.

But it ends up getting in the way.

A government gets in the way when it tries to manage from above decisions that people can make for themselves. A manager gets in the way when they turn the team into executors of the manager’s answers and waste the knowledge of those closest to the problem. An overprotective parent gets in the way when, by sparing their children every pain, they also keep them from forming their own judgment.

Overprotection has a cost we don’t always see: it interrupts the process by which a person experiments, makes mistakes, faces the consequences, learns and corrects.

In trying to avoid the mistake, it can prevent the learning.

That’s why I believe authority, well exercised, should start from one simple instruction: get in the way as little as possible.

That doesn’t mean disappearing. Nor abandoning, letting anything go, or watching with indifference. It means recognizing that freedom belongs first to the individual and that the role of whoever holds authority is not to replace their judgment every time they think they know more.

The right to experiment

Every person should have the right to make their own decisions, try out paths, make mistakes and make the necessary corrections. But that right comes with a responsibility: owning whatever happens.

Being responsible means accepting the gains and the losses. Repairing the damage when that’s called for, and rightfully enjoying the fruits of having acted well. Being, in a word, accountable for the whole decision: for the good and for the bad.

Freedom without responsibility becomes impunity. Responsibility without freedom becomes obedience. We need both.

This also helps define when it is legitimate to intervene. The line shouldn’t fall between the decisions an authority considers right and the ones it considers wrong. It should fall between recoverable mistakes and risks of ruin.

If the downside is small, the possible learning is large and the person deciding can bear the consequences, the reasonable thing is not to intervene. Let them try.

But if the potential harm is irreversible or existential, intervention may be justified. There must also be a limit when the decision invades other people’s fundamental rights or passes on to them costs they never agreed to bear.

Not every mistake needs to be avoided. But we do need to prevent ruin and protect other people’s rights.

Whoever decides must live with the consequences

The problem with power is not only that it decides with incomplete knowledge. It’s that often the one making the decision doesn’t personally pay the cost when they’re wrong.

The government leader designs a policy and citizens carry the failure. The manager imposes a strategy and the team answers for the results. A parent controls a child’s decisions, but the child is the one who will have to live the life those decisions produced.

In all these cases there is a dangerous break: someone keeps the power to decide while someone else receives the consequences.

If the decision goes well, whoever gave the orders can take the credit. If it goes badly, the cost is spread among people who may have seen the risk, proposed another alternative or never had a voice.

Authority becomes more dangerous the greater the distance between the one who decides and the one who bears the result.

Freedom corrects part of that asymmetry. It returns the decision to the person who has more information about their own reality and, at the same time, requires them to take on its effects. It doesn’t guarantee they’ll get it right. It guarantees something more honest: that they’ll have incentives to learn, because something of theirs is at stake.

So what is authority for?

If a good government, a good manager or a good parent should get in the way as little as possible, that doesn’t mean they have nothing to contribute. Their role can be enormously valuable, but it’s different from deciding everything.

A good authority challenges the mental models people use to make decisions. It asks uncomfortable questions. It points out contradictions. It cultivates conversations that broaden how a problem is understood.

It also provides tools and brings evidence. It doesn’t just pile up information, and it doesn’t appeal to its rank as if the position automatically turned an opinion into truth. It asks what works, what doesn’t, what we really know and what we’re only assuming.

Finally, it sets clear rules of the game, especially those that protect the rights of third parties and prevent risks of ruin. And once they’re set, it makes sure they’re enforced consistently.

After that, it steps aside.

A good authority doesn’t create dependence: it builds judgment. It doesn’t demand that others think like it: it helps them think better. It doesn’t eliminate every possibility of error: it creates conditions for mistakes to be small, visible and correctable.

Who corrects the one in charge?

One unavoidable question remains, though: if authority must challenge other people’s mental models, who challenges the authority’s?

That’s why dissent can’t be seen as disloyalty. Whoever lives with the consequences must have a voice to question whoever makes the decision. It must be possible to review the evidence, publicly acknowledge the mistake and change course.

We need a clear memory of decisions: what was decided, who decided it, on what evidence, what result they expected, what actually happened and what they learned afterward. Not a wall of shame designed to humiliate, but a record of accountability that keeps mistakes from being hidden, history from being rewritten, or blame from being shifted.

And we have to distinguish between the quality of a decision and its outcome.

A person can analyze the evidence well, acknowledge the uncertainty, make a sound decision and still get a bad outcome. That doesn’t necessarily make them irresponsible. In the same way, someone can ignore the evidence, act recklessly and get lucky. A good outcome doesn’t make the decision good.

A serious culture must evaluate both things separately: the process by which the decision was made and the consequences that finally followed. It must value the well-built decision, even when the outcome wasn’t the one expected, and demand correction when reality contradicts our hypotheses.

The humility of letting others decide

Freedom doesn’t promise a society without mistakes. It promises a society in which no government, manager, parent, expert or committee can easily assume it knows enough to live other people’s lives.

It doesn’t claim that everyone will choose well. It claims that nobody holds all the knowledge needed to choose for everyone.

That’s why it leaves room to try, learn and correct. It lets recoverable mistakes produce knowledge. It steps in against ruin and against harm to third parties. And it demands that whoever decides be responsible for both the gains and the losses.

Maybe leading well doesn’t consist of having all the answers. Maybe it consists of building better questions, bringing evidence, setting clear rules, protecting the fundamental limits and letting each person develop their own judgment.

It’s a less visible, less heroic and much humbler form of authority.

An authority that understands that helping doesn’t always mean deciding.

And that, many times, the best way to help is simply to get in the way as little as possible.