An Appeal to Fewer Freedoms

by

Anonymous

It should be apparent that absolute freedom is equal to the death of order.

Should an individual be free to hurt or kill another over a minor misdeed, to steal what she has not earned, to carelessly threaten kin with danger, and to escape without threat of consequence or bondage? The answer to these is clearly no; such things are firmly known as injustice and crime.

Yet with concepts of justice rooted in our society, why is it that any further tightening of law is so often met with outcry and fallacious rebuttal? Do we really now balance upon the temperamental scales of freedom and law so precariously that a pound of amendments will throw us wildly into tyranny? If so, what says that of our political reality?

Think, I plead: is our Godqueen freely wont to allow state tyranny?

I ask these questions not to harry the reader but rather to grasp the attention of those whom the counterargument therein seeks to sway. Thus is a thesis in favor of the FDE Mage License Stricture Act, hence called the Stricture Act.

The want for freedom is instinctive to kin and perhaps even reflexive. It is sister to another reflex, superstition. As unicorns, it was our ancient superstition to bolt up and bound off from a rustle in the brush or the snap of a twig. It was superstition that let us outsmart the jaws of vicious predators and indeed, become the capital kin we are now. However, with our predators all but dominated, and with the invention of safeguards such as arms and magic, this reflex is now vestigial at best and crippling at worst.

Precisely the same can be said about the reflexive want for freedom. It is a strong and binding feeling that jolts us much the same: if we are stripped of one freedom, then more must surely follow. Of that I ask, wherein lies a problem?

A common argument from opposition is thus. If the Stricture Act passes approval, then not only will magic be restricted to fewer, better-qualified persons as the act states, but soon to an unnamed even smaller privileged few—perhaps trusted elite, or nobility, or military. Such an argument preys on instinct with the assumption that the seclusion of magic from common kin is a loathsome outcome. When this assumption is easily toppled, so too is the argument it supports.

[The thesis goes on to assert that the vast majority of kin cannot be trusted with magic, and that a less magically-free society is a freer society overall.]