THE PRICE OF A PERFECT WORLD
Can a world without suffering ever be truly perfect if freedom is the price we must pay?
by Sezer Ali | OCT 1, 2026
THE MOMENT OF CHOICE
An allegory of free will, collective obedience and the promise of a perfect world.
If freedom allows us to destroy one another, would a world without free will really be such a terrible alternative?
Imagine a world without war, exploitation or suffering. A world in which compassion is not merely encouraged but guaranteed, where humanity no longer possesses the capacity to inflict cruelty upon itself.
It sounds almost irresistible. Until we consider the price.
What if such a world could exist only by removing our freedom to choose?
This was the moral dilemma that stayed with me after reading Shorefall (2020), Robert Jackson Bennett's second novel in The Founders Trilogy. Beneath its imaginative world of magic, artificial gods and systems resembling computer algorithms lies a question that extends far beyond fiction: is peace still meaningful when it is no longer a choice?
In Bennett's world, magic operates almost like computer programming. Reality can be rewritten through complex instructions, and even godlike beings can emerge from this extraordinary technology.
One of them is Crasedes Magnus, an ancient figure who has witnessed centuries of human violence, exploitation and the repeated failure of civilisation to overcome its destructive instincts.
His proposed solution is radical: rather than trusting humanity to change, he seeks to change humanity itself. Remove the impulses that produce violence, and perhaps the cycle of suffering can finally end.
There is something deeply unsettling about this proposition. Yet there is also something disturbingly persuasive about it.
Human history offers little reassurance that freedom inevitably produces wisdom. We have survived wars, genocides, political oppression and environmental destruction, only to reproduce many of the conditions that made them possible. We remember our catastrophes, build monuments to their victims and promise that they will never happen again. Then, under different circumstances, we discover new ways to repeat them.
Perhaps our greatest weakness is not our inability to recognise suffering, but our remarkable capacity to accommodate it.
We often imagine that catastrophe will eventually teach humanity what reason could not. That after enough destruction, we might finally recognise the value of cooperation over domination, compassion over indifference. But history offers no guarantee that suffering produces wisdom. Sometimes it simply creates new hierarchies, new divisions and new justifications for exercising power over others.
And yet the alternative presents an equally troubling possibility.
A perfectly ordered society, achieved by controlling human consciousness, would eliminate not only cruelty but the moral independence that makes compassion meaningful. Kindness would cease to be an ethical decision and become a programmed response. Peace might exist, but nobody would have chosen it.
There is another contradiction. To prevent humanity from committing atrocities, someone must first claim the authority to determine what humanity should become. The promise of universal harmony begins with an act of absolute domination.
Even those who resist such a system may find themselves adopting the methods of their enemy, sacrificing parts of their own humanity to preserve what remains of everyone else's.
This is where the distinction between good and evil becomes less comfortable. The question is no longer simply who possesses the nobler intentions, but how much destruction we are willing to justify in pursuit of them.
I would like to believe that humanity can learn without first destroying itself. That freedom, despite its failures, contains the possibility of genuine moral progress. But optimism becomes difficult when history repeatedly demonstrates how easily knowledge and experience coexist with indifference.
Perhaps the most frightening possibility is not that someone might one day take away our freedom.
It is that, confronted with enough suffering, we might willingly surrender it.
And I am not entirely certain what I would choose.
THE PRICE OF A PERFECT WORLD
What if a world without war, cruelty or suffering could exist only at the cost of human freedom? Inspired by Robert Jackson Bennett’s "Shorefall", this reflection explores the uneasy relationship between free will, moral responsibility and the seductive promise of a perfect world.
OPINION