The founders of the American republic assumed malice would be constrained by material scarcity: Weapons were expensive, destructive power centralized, and the state’s police and military could deter or punish most offenders. That order is collapsing. The diffusion of advanced technologies is improving the destructive capacity of individuals faster than the defensive capabilities of states. As their protective monopoly erodes, governments face a stark choice: tolerate higher levels of risk, or abandon liberty in the name of control.

A century ago, the great fear was that a state might monopolize ammonia production or nuclear fission. Today, the nightmare is that a student with a GPU cluster and a $200 DNA order could unleash devastation. Consider the contrast: The Unabomber spent 17 years in a Montana shack painstakingly wiring explosives. His successors won’t need to. They can query open-source models for forbidden knowledge or assemble pathogens with off-the-shelf lab equipment.

This asymmetry reveals something fundamental about emerging threats. Unlike traditional weapons requiring substantial resources and infrastructure to operate, today’s most dangerous capabilities are “glass cannons”—fragile, low-cost, but capable of disproportionate destruction. The list of threats is growing: AI systems that could enhance cyber attacks, gene synthesizers that lower barriers to biological weapons development, quantum computers that could compromise encryption standards.

As technology democratizes destructive capacity, the classical tools of governance—deterrence through policing, resilience through social cohesion—grow insufficient to contain it. Liberal societies cannot monitor every dorm room or garage nor harden themselves against every conceivable attack.

The temptation, then, is for governments to reach for new instruments of control: predictive policing powered by AI, algorithmic regulation of online speech, and new regimes to license or suppress forbidden knowledge. This is the logic of the Zero-Tolerance State, trading liberty for the illusion of safety. China’s social credit system is the logical end of a politics that places risk-elimination above liberty. Singapore’s pandemic response hinted at a softer version of the same instinct: orderly and deeply invasive.

Call it the “Minority Report Fallacy”—the belief that sufficiently advanced surveillance can create perfect security. History suggests otherwise. Mass surveillance programs failed to prevent terrorist attacks from Boston to Paris. Transnational crime flourishes despite unprecedented signals intelligence. Threats evolve faster and more creatively than the systems designed to thwart them.

The techno-paternalist solution risks sacrificing technology’s transformative benefits in pursuit of safety. It ignores that the very forces enabling individual actors to inflict mass harm are also creating unprecedented opportunities for human creativity and innovation. The same tools that could synthesize bioweapons are revolutionizing medicine. The AI systems that pose alignment risks are also solving protein folding and accelerating scientific discovery.

Authoritarian societies may excel at suppressing obvious threats, but they systematically fail at the rapid adaptation and creative problem-solving. A society that treats every citizen as a potential terrorist is unlikely to demonstrate the flexibility needed to address novel forms of attack. Such systems are brittle—optimized for known risks but vulnerable to black swan events.

Democratic societies, for all their chaos, possess structural advantages for grappling with novel threats. They are accustomed to managing uncertainty and change. They regularly survive transitions of power that would shatter more rigid systems. Critically, they distribute both defensive capabilities and innovative potential across millions of autonomous actors rather than concentrating them in centralized bureaucracies.

Consider COVID-19. Authoritarian China initially suppressed information about the outbreak, allowing it to spread while maintaining the fiction of control. Democratic societies, despite initial chaos, ultimately outperformed in developing vaccines and treatments. The mRNA vaccines that ended the pandemic weren’t developed by government laboratories, but by private companies in competitive markets.

In a world of rapidly evolving threats, the ability to adapt quickly matters more than the ability to predict perfectly. Authoritarian systems optimize for the latter while democracies, almost by accident, optimize for the former.

This doesn’t mean democratic societies should ignore emerging risks or give up on governing glass-cannon technologies. But our response should emphasize resilience over control, adaptation over prediction. We should invest in early warning systems, not omniscient surveillance. We should build redundancy into critical infrastructure, not perfect security around every threat. We should cultivate citizens capable of informed judgment, not passive consumers of technocratic expertise. The alternative may offer the illusion of safety but ultimately guarantees stagnation. A society that treats its own citizens as existential threats is incapable of competing with freer counterparts.

We are entering an unprecedented and extraordinarily dangerous age where individual actors possess capabilities once reserved for nation-states. The solution is not to abandon the principles that have allowed free societies to prosper and adapt for centuries. Instead, we must trust that those same principles—individual liberty, distributed decision-making, competitive markets, and adaptive institutions—will prove more durable than the brittle perfection promised by the Zero-Tolerance State.