This tension does not resolve. It shifts. Every society calibrates the dial between freedom and order differently, and every calibration creates losers.
Lean too far toward freedom and you get predation, inequality, and the breakdown of shared institutions. Lean too far toward order and you get surveillance, conformity, and the slow death of creativity and dissent.
Mill argued that the only legitimate reason to restrict a person’s freedom is to prevent harm to others. Hobbes argued that without a sovereign power, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Confucius held that harmony arises not from imposed rules but from cultivated virtue — yet his system still required hierarchy.
The honest answer is that no formula resolves this. Every generation must negotiate it anew, and the negotiation itself — the democratic argument about where the line should fall — may be more important than wherever it lands.