This post quickly morphed into an essay, covering at a quite shallow depth material that could easily become a tome if I were to deal with it adequately.
So, my apologies in advance for length and over-complexity. Like all bullshit once it’s been adequately deconstructed, obscurity through overcomplication is standard. This is the best I can do right now to untangle the nonsense and concisely and clearly present the issue. I’m sure that for many readers it will seem anything but concise and clear, so I ask you for a charitable reading.
My aim in posting this is to introduce the ideas, not to explain them in much depth nor defend them. I just want to get the conversation started, which I’ve found over the last decade is very difficult to do. The main problem is that no one thinks it’s a worthy conversation, (not even Noam Chomsky – see emails of July 2017 and December 2017,) being under the mistaken presumption that abundant work has already been done on this point. I say “presumption” because now it’s abundantly clear that they had neither looked to find others who have worked on it, nor had they worked on it themselves.
I will (hopefully soon) publish a survey of 49 authors, experts on the subject, to show just how deplorable the situation is and how little consideration has been paid to the most basic question about law and authority: should we use them at all in any form for any purpose, or are they instead unavoidably detrimental -- a net harm, not a net benefit? The paper won’t ask that question nor answer it. The paper will ask why so little work has been done – having shown that virtually none has been done – to answer such a fundamental question, when it not only should have been done but done long ago.
This essay will present the questions and problems with law, specifically, (and its modern underpinnings, “rights”,) as an entry into discussion on so-called “rule of law” and its key concept: authority.
To understand a fight, it’s crucial to identify the instigating aggressor.
It’s especially important if you think that fights are sometimes legitimate and can be justified.
I don’t.
But I do insist that order in our thinking is crucial. Chronology is crucial. Which caused what is crucial. Logic, rationality, and reasonableness are crucial.
But reasonableness is exactly what a person who claims fidelity to chronology, causation, logic, and rationality must first jettison in order to believe that any fight can be “justified” – especially when it results in homicide, especially when it results in murder, especially when we euphemize murder as “capital punishment” or mass murder and genocide as “war”.
To legitimize or justify fighting, we first must jettison the truth that there is always, always a better way to go than to choose off and fight.
This is why all “patriots” are idiots.
But my topic here is law. Law per se. The device of law, creating laws, enforcing and punishing violations of law, especially the incredibly stupid, cultic-true-believing idea that without laws there would be chaos.
Really? Is that what you experience moment-to-moment? Is that what occupies your thinking and alternately motivates and regulates your behavior? Laws and abiding by them?
If so, the most disturbing chaos of all goes on inside your head.
As a former rabidly Bible-believing “holiness” Christian obsessed with “purity” and “cleansing myself from all sin”, I certainly know what I’m talking about on that point. My life was characterized by one long, intense, gruesome, seemingly interminable war against myself in “temptation” raging without a break, against my “sinful nature”, as I picked my way through each new situation like a minefield strewn with “God’s laws” of conduct and morality and “godliness”, unsure which next step might blow one up.
But you don’t need to be a religious fanatic to know what I’m talking about. Here in the U.S. we just had Thanksgiving, and Christmas is coming up. Family gatherings are notoriously stressful, like fields planted with Claymores rigged with invisible trigger wires of unspoken rules and taboos that we dare not trip but can only barely avoid.
Such situations are the opposite of protected, safe, peaceful, and good.
Living by laws and rules is the real, daily chaos of most people, and it’s no metaphor or fantasy. Law has ALWAYS legitimized EVERY heinous policy and practice from slavery to racism to mass murder/genocide (aka “war”).
Without exception, law has been used by infinitesimal fractions of humanity to crush the rest of humanity for thousands of years.
Law creates and justifies massive chaos and devastation that far and away dwarf the grand total of gang activity and riots and “organized crime” and streetcorner thuggery and white-collar shenanigans lumped together with all the other supposedly “criminal” activities that it pretends to “war on” – but it lies.
Not all the gangsters and Mafia dons and cartel kingpins and Ponzis, Madoffs, and Bankman-Frieds and rapists and wife beaters and child fuckers and kidnappers, thieves, brawlers, blackmailers, extortioners, and all other non-state “criminals” put together have come remotely close to the chaos and devastation of state-initiated and state-sanctioned slaughtering, maiming, and raping of hundreds of millions of people in the 20th and 21st centuries, along with billions of children and women and the infirm throughout human history, by emperors and kings and queens and princes and sultans and presidents and prime ministers and other heads of state and their cronies and henchmen who either were directly responsible for the atrocities or utterly incompetent to deliver on the promises of their protection rackets.
Our “authorities” lied to us. All authorities lie to their people. Achieving their aims on the basis of fraud is precisely why “authority” was invented.
They indoctrinated and brainwashed us to believe that their chaos and devastation – their evil – are legitimate and inevitable, but that all other chaos and devastation are “criminal”.
Why? Is it because they think that “criminal” chaos and devastation are morally wrong?
No. It’s got shitall to do with morality because “criminal” wrongs flip and flop and turn white to black and back again with the agreement a handful of elitists then “in power” and a twist of the pen. That’s why the policies and actions of authoritarians often leave us scratching our heads. We’re looking for moral rationality in the definitionally amoral used to shield the immoral.
Law is the device by which a society breaks from real morality so that it can dehumanize and violate its people in disregard of morality and any obligation to it.
If authoritarians can profit from the evil of chaos and devastation, they pretend it’s good. In fact, they pretend it’s “glorious”. If they cannot profit from evil, even though it’s the same chaos and devastation wreaked for like reasons to achieve like goals, it suddenly becomes mortal sin.
Promising protection from the mice, they have trampled us with elephants for millennia and have no intention of letting up.
Hereafter, by “law” I mean anything and everything related to law, including the systems, institutions, codified laws, all the way up to their ideal, their seminal concept, the entire category referred to as “law”.
I mentioned the instigating aggressor of a conflict because this cult belief in the necessity of “the rule of law” is not only bullshit – it’s got a specific purpose. The purpose isn’t just to make sure we never, ever question the need for laws, it’s to make sure we never, ever realize that the imposition of a legal system is itself the original, instigating aggression, the violation that legitimizes the atrocities of the true aggressors – the ruling elites – and criminalizes every act and actor that resist their rule.
Laws and those who swear by them are the aggressors here. Everyone else is just trying to defend themselves.
Defend against what?
Criminalization.
This is not prelude to a conspiracy theory, I promise. Or if it is, I’m in great company.
Stanford University, for one.
Here is a clip from their The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, “Theories of Criminal Law”, under the heading “Justifications of Criminal Law:
It is “far from clear” that we are justified in having criminal law?
WTF!!! ?
Are you kidding me?
Clearly, the jury of legal experts is still out on the primary question, the fundamental question, “Should we even have laws at all?”
So, I ask, “WHY THE FUCK HAS THIS QUESTION NOT BEEN ANSWERED YET?”
Criminal law “must be capable of realizing some value that gives us sufficient reason to retain it.”
Duhr.
I think everyone would agree with that. In fact, everyone assumes so certainly and heartily that its value has been so well-established – or we’d be fools to load the house onto a boat we never checked would float, right? Almost universally, we don’t see any question at all.
Of course it realizes value, oodles of it!
Right?
No doubt some really smart people, somewhere at some time, certainly have already done all the work needed to show that law realizes value, because we law-and-order true-believers certainly have not done it ourselves.
Right?
I’ve studied morality, ethics, law, and the mother of them all – religion – ever since I fell in love with philosophy as a high-school sophomore in 1970, but I don’t write as a “philosopher” or academic would, because this matter is not in any way academic. This paper isn’t written from the so-called “objective” point of view of a scholar, (if you’ve ever tried to read that stuff, you’ll understand why,) nor is it theoretical, although it contains ideas that could be characterized as “theoretical”. It is pointed, personal, and pragmatic. It’s not about mere principle, but a profound, palpable perversion that we – me, my family, my friends, and humanity at large – are daily forced to deal with in our very real, concrete world that was hijacked and now run by authoritarians.
I write because I care deeply about very non-theoretical people suffering under a very non-theoretical, millennia-long fraud.
I wondered whether to call the gimmicks used by authoritarians to create their grand theater of compulsory nonsense “fictions” or “frauds” or “farces”.
Fiction passed off as truth is a fraud. Frauds that should have been exposed long ago but have persisted for thousands of years are farces. So, I was left with “farce”.
But “farce” is still far, far from the awful reality.
By using a narrative that has all the integrity and fairness of a Ponzi scheme hyping the emperor’s new clothes:
1. Authoritarians snow entire populations into accepting unjust, disadvantageous, vulnerable postures, obligating their obedience when no obligation exists.
2. Having snowed their “subjects”, their “citizens”, authoritarians legitimize punishment for disobedience by deliberately inflicting harm or unnecessary and injurious pain and violation on human beings that they dehumanized as “criminals”.
In so doing, rule-of-law regimes commit crimes against humanity which together constitute a massive uber-crime – criminalization – which can only be characterized, properly and sincerely and fairly, as FUBAR.
From a 1985 criminology textbook whose basic assumptions are still representative of scholarly opinion on law as it has been oh since the 18th Century:
-- Michalowski, Raymond J., Order, law, and crime : an introduction to criminology, 1985
The FUBAR of criminalization – the process of transforming the real behaviors of real individuals “into crime and criminals,” both white-collar” and “blue-“, is far worse humanly and morally and its damages far more extensive than all the wars and ethnic cleansings and genocides and slavery and systemic racism and every other state-sanctioned horror throughout our history.
I say “unnecessary and injurious pain and violation” because, as we’ll see, the supposed obligation to obey laws is a farce.
I say “far more extensive” because no humanity-devastating travesty, ever, could have been perpetrated by any rule-of-law regime if not for its primary tool for terrorizing people into subservience: law. The incalculable horrors filling our history texts – so pervasive and entrenched and dreadful, we’d be utter fools to think that stories could remotely reflect even a shadow of their hellish realities, which have been so ubiquitous and dark that many people today fall into the false belief that the monstrous resides in “human nature” – none of them would have been possible if not for the laws that that mindless adherence to “follow orders” of their authoritarian regimes that is unique to the “law-abiding”, without which otherwise normal people would never condone authorities that induce, create, fund, mobilize, operate, support, and perpetuate racism, pogroms, racism, invasion, conquest, colonialization, and genocide.
All legal systems are themselves systematic violations of humans and other living creatures, aka persons; and their primary output satisfies their primary purpose: perpetual violation as a tool of mass social control.
All legal systems – both in that they deliberately inflict harm or unnecessary and injurious pain and because deliberate infliction of harm and pain are the headwaters of their “power” – are evil.
The transformation of behaviors and individuals into crime and criminals is a patently dehumanizing process. I defy anyone to show material differences between this kind of dehumanization and the dehumanization involved in racism, ethnic hatred, or the demonization of “the enemy” in war. What’s more, the mere fact that the state is the perpetrator does not make their dehumanization of human beings materially different or in any way less evil and violating than dehumanization by non-state actors. To the extent and in precisely the same ways that racism, ethnic hatred, and demonization of foreigners as the enemy are evil and violate their victims, criminalization is evil and violates its victims – who aren’t just those convicted of crimes. Far more extensively, the law as it actually operates in the real world dehumanizes “good citizens” erroneously suspected for criminal wrongdoing, “good citizens” who happened to be at the wrong place, wrong time, and piss off a cop, and “good citizens” who unwittingly broke laws that even cops and lawyers and judges didn't know were on the books until they tried to find some that they could charge the hapless schmucks for breaking.
There’s a lot of controversy about the term “evil” these days. There shouldn’t be. I define evil as the deliberate infliction of harm or unnecessary/injurious pain. If deliberately inflicting harm or unnecessary/injurious pain isn’t evil, then nothing is.
However, please notice that I didn't say “systematic violations of human rights” – or any kind of rights, for that matter.
I am not talking about the violation of abstract human concepts which amount to no more than fiat rules. That’s the pet that authorities love to stroke. In other words, I am not talking about betrayal or rebellion or treason or insurrection toward a narrative, i.e., violation of mere stories.
I'm talking about the violation of real, flesh and blood, living beings.
The difference between the two is no less or less profound than the difference between your name and story vs. you.
We could say that to deliberately inflict harm or unnecessary/injurious pain constitutes violation, but that would imply that masochism is violation, which most people other than the extremely religious or “moral” would consider preposterous. Masochists, at least, would certainly disagree with the equation.
A violation occurs when the person to whom evil was done, on whom harm or unnecessary/injurious pain was inflicted, honestly tells us that they were violated. They are the only ones who would know.
So, a violation occurs when the person who suffered deliberate harm or unnecessary/injurious pain, aka evil, says it violated them.
We can ascertain that deliberate harm or unnecessary/injurious pain, aka evil, was inflicted on others, but only those on whom it was inflicted can tell us if they were violated. This might seem like a strange, unnecessary distinction, but it’s crucial, because there are always two or more sides to evil and violation: the evildoer(s) and the victim(s).
The mere fact that victims did not complain that they were violated does not in any way show that no evil was done. “They gave their consent,” or, “They did not object,” or, “It was their choice,” or, “They were asking for it,” or any other lame claim to the effect that there was no violation is stillborn. Even if something like those excuses were true, it still would not in any way demonstrate that no evil had been done. But far more importantly – and this highlights the hypocrisy and stupidity of violators everywhere – no one but the violated can establish that a violation occurred. In other words, coming from the lips of anyone other than the victim on whom evil was inflicted, “No one was violated,” is a self-negating claim made by those pretending to speak for victims, thereby ignoring and erasing their voices. What’s more, “There was no violation,” is an implied confession that evil was indeed inflicted, because unless evil had been done, no question of violation would be coherent, and so, no answer to that question would be coherent.
Far from being a strange, unnecessary distinction, this distinction is paramount when it comes to evil done to children, the mentally challenged (including our elders grown frail, compliant, and senile), and cult members (believe it or not) who have been indoctrinated to accept evil and willingly suffer it as proof of devotion.
The Rights Scam
I will digress here from law per se to look at “rights” because, ever since 1948 when the United Nations adopted its ironically named Universal Declaration of Human Rights , (if rights were truly universal, they would not have needed declaration, now would they?) and thanks to a huge push by the Civil Rights movements of the 50s and 60s, increasingly, laws have been enacted under a presumption that “rights” are their basis and that laws implement specific protections of “rights”.
So, if the root of the tree turns out to be rotten, what should we say about the tree?
If the concept of “rights” itself is problematic or even bogus, then, to the extent that laws are based on recognition of “rights” and presumed to implement “rights” protections, they are likewise problematic or even bogus.
Think of it like this: when a relative sexually abuses, rapes, and impregnates a 12 year old girl, if we take the whole of the meaning of her violation and reduce it to “violation of her rights”, we’ve fallen far, far short of honestly and fully and humanly grasping what's really going on and what’s actually at stake.
What’s more important and real: her “rights” or her violated, injured body, her traumatized, mutilated psyche, the destruction of one or many of her most important relationships, and her ongoing sense of danger, shame, and insecurity in her own family?
“Rights” make us take our eyes off the ball and pretend we caught it instead of admitting that it hit us square in the nose.
In my upcoming book, The Rights Scam, I show that so-called human rights were invented precisely to serve as a straw man, a fiction onto which our attention could be derailed, off and away from real harm done to real persons.
When “rights” are the filter, violation of persons gets a pass unless we can show that their “rights” were violated.
No violation of a stipulated “right”? Then, no violation at all – not in a “rights” paradigm.
This is ridiculous.
Yes, I’m saying that “human rights”, “animal rights”, or any other kind of “rights” are ridiculous. I’m saying, therefore, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is ridiculous. The very concept of “rights” is fundamentally and functionally and fatally flawed. As such, I must conclude that the United Nations conceived and established a declaration of absurdity for some other reason than reducing the evil and violation in the world.
The ostensible point of invoking “rights” is to protect us against evil and violation – but the actual net effect of invoking “rights” is to limit this supposed protection and make it conditional which, in turn, makes it arguable.
By “conditional” I’m talking about the credibility of questioning if something is true or real, in contrast to the credibility of asserting that it is true or real – i.e., questioning the credibility of the question if it’s true or real. This might sound redundant, but it’s not. In other words, we’re asking if it makes sense to question the truth or reality of something. We’re asking if the question of truth or reality is credible. If the truth/reality question is credible to us, the credibility of a matter is conditional. It makes sense to question it, doubt it, argue it, demand justification for it, etc. If the truth/reality question is not credible to us, whether because we tacitly assume it or stipulate it to be true or proven or a given or necessary/unavoidable or mandatory/obligatory, its credibility is unconditional: no question, no doubt, nothing to argue.
There is nothing conditional about the fact that violating people really and truly damages and harms them. There is nothing to question, doubt, or argue about when real evil violates real persons. The evil and violation of real people is undeniably evident, plainly and highly repugnant, and – given the definition of “evil” as deliberate infliction of harm or unnecessary/injurious pain – it is evil.
But in a “rights” paradigm, that doesn’t matter – because in a “rights” paradigm, it doesn’t matter what actually happened. Establishing that evil and violation really happened does not alone establish that wrong that we should be protected from them. Only once the “rights” question is answered are people eligible for protection under rights.
How do we know this? Because mere facts of evil and violation alone do not activate any rights-based response to the evil and violation. In a “rights” paradigm, only two things activate a material response to evil and violation of persons:
A determination that a person’s rights were violated, which does not even ask the question, “Was this person violated and harmed?” but instead implicitly accepts the fact of evil and violation by asking the rights question: “Did the violations and harms done to this person constitute a violation of rights?” That is a very different question which subordinates real evil violating real persons to a less important status than questions which revolve around abstract constructs.
Money, yet another abstract construct.
Why would we switch our focus from evil violating real persons onto violation of an abstract construct? And why is this switch important?
It shifts the psyches of those involved into a less human (aka more “objective”), more depersonalized (and there for more dehumanized) mode where not only is empathy lacking – it doesn’t even belong.
It shifts determination of wrongdoing away from the facts of what really happened onto a set of criteria concerned solely with narratives, intentionally ignoring real persons, because the criteria are concerned solely with curated renditions of what really happened and curated renditions of real persons, not the full facts of the realities themselves.
Given a narrative about what really happened and a narrative of rights under protection, the question, “Did real evil violate real people?” gets transmutated into, “Does this rendition of evil violating people fit our rendition of a rights violation?” A narrative is compared to a narrative and the determination of whether they match or not lies wholly aside from the realities. In fact, this way of dealing with evil violating real persons effectively excludes the realities from consideration.
So, with all this in mind, ask yourself if it adds up to “rights” making it harder to violate and harm persons? And, after the fact of evil and violation, do “rights” make the wrong of having aggressed and transgressed more clear and harder to wriggle out of responsibility for?
And we haven’t even got to the consequences of flipping the table by limiting rights to a stipulated list.
Instead of restricting the violations and harms to persons which we’ll conditionally allow to a limited, specific, clearly articulated, stipulated list, we flipped the innately human, healthy, care-based presumption protected unless proven otherwise, to violable until proven otherwise.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is a violator-centric presumption, and it’s no trivial, academic matter. Why don’t we have an even more well-recognized, oft-repeated, victim-centric statement of presumption? I’ll bet you can’t even think what one might be. You might not even understand what I’m talking about here. This lopsided bias and injustice is glaring in our courts system when viewed from the perspective of victims of crime.
We’ve restricted these supposed protections against evil and violation to a very short list. Instead of making violations and harm unquestionably prohibited except for a limited, specific, clearly articulated, stipulated list that we’ll recognize as open to question, doubt, and argument – i.e., instead of restricting evil and violation that we might conditionally accept -- we’ve made protection from evil and violation conditional and restricted it to a short list.
This is the opposite of a persons-protecting presumption.
Instead of presumptively prohibiting evil and violation, allowing them only conditionally and narrowly, we presumptively allow any and all evil and violation to persons unless we’ve stipulated that they should be protected against.
Instead of demanding clear reason and proof that specific violations or harms should be allowed while prohibiting all others, we demand clear reason and proof that specific violations or harms should be protected against, but presumptively ignore and implicitly exonerate all others.
In “rights” paradigms, protective preventions and responses to evil and violation must be justified – otherwise, evil and violation get a pass.
This flip of presumption is profound.
Consider a plaque hanging in a family’s dining room:
(I have no clue why the paraphrased Golden Rule was relegated to fine print, lol.)
So, standing right beside the poster, Timmy tells his sister, “I LOVE YOU!” and punches her in the eye. His sister screams. Mom runs into the dining room to see what’s amiss. Her daughter tells her what happened. She looks at the poster.
Did Timmy break the rules? Did Timmy violate his sister’s “rights” under those rules?
Nope – not unless you want to argue that he violated the fine print.
Or look at it like this. By limiting the protections offered by rights to a specific, clearly articulated, stipulated list, we imply that every possible evil or violation that isn’t declared as a rights violation gets a pass, or at most is arguable. It even could be (and routinely is) argued that evil and violation were “necessary” or “beneficial”. Otherwise, no matter the evil, no matter how violated and traumatized and broken victimized people might be, violators in a “rights” paradigm will be left free to pursue any and every evil or violation not stipulated and protected against by a “right.”
Is that how good, competent parents should handle the protection of their children?
Absolutely not.
So, why do we accept such a weak, ineffective, and deplorable approach when it comes to “authorities” protecting us?
If that’s not bad enough, as soon as one of those presumptively allowed violations or harms are added to the list as the violation of a “right”, it suddenly goes white to black and becomes a “rights violation”.
How does adding an item to a “bill” or “declaration” of “rights” have any effect or bearing whatsoever on the nature of what really happens? Yesterday it was arguably OK because it didn’t violate a “right” – but today the exact same violation of persons becomes inarguably wrong because we stipulated it in a document? Yesterday it wasn’t illegal, so there’s nothing we can do about it, but today we passed a law, so now cops can apprehend you and even kill you dead “if necessary”, usually without repercussions worse than a slap on the wrist?
Who does this make any sense to?
Well, thinking about that question is illuminating. The obvious answer is: the kind of person who cares more about mass control of human behavior by means of elaborate systems of abstract constructs than they do the real evil and violation and pain being inflicted on real persons in the real world. And what kind of person is that? Caring, loving, empathetic, intelligent people who feel humanity’s suffering and want it to end? Or, might it be the kind that looks down on the mass of “human resources” as a profiteering opportunity, and their suffering as advantageous? The kind that detaches from human realities, insulates itself from them, and from its lofty, self-granted heights plays with systems that control human affairs like they were some hifalutin chess game?
I know what answer my decades of investigation and analytical work have led me to. I think you’ll realize, as you look at how the world really works, free from the shades through which for decades we’ve been trained and warned by threat to look through, the world works by principles that are completely consistent with a psychopath’s view of the world – one that not only is violently opposed to a human, caring view of the world, but one that dismisses and prohibits that view as irrelevant to every important question.
I hope you are starting to realize the nature of the problem, now, and why even the most “radical” proposals to overcome the oligarchic stranglehold encompassing the globe have fallen prey to the irrationality of the very systems they oppose, because they unwittingly or nonchalantly accept the deranged foundation of the psychopathic paradigm that bred those same systems.
In a nutshell, “rights” are weak declarations of rules that merely pretend to protect us against evil, (i.e., deliberately inflicted harm or unnecessary/injurious pain,) especially when the evildoer is the government we supposedly “gave consent” to rule us (even though none of us gave our consent prior to subordination to it). “Rights” promise to “protect” us, but only if they’ve been stipulated as “rights” – because, in a “rights” paradigm, violation of persons isn’t necessarily wrong, but violation of a person’s rights is always wrong.
Believe it or not, this actually makes “sense” to people, possibly even to you, but I’m baffled as to why.
When you make a limited list of the prohibited, the list of the permissible is wide open, limited only by imagination.
When you make a limited list of violations you’ll protect against, the presumption flips and the list of violations against which you offer no protection is wide open, limited only by imagination.
Like I said, this is a profound difference, and it serves the advantage of violators.
As models concerned with reducing the evil and violation and pain in the world, rights and laws are the opposite of each other when it comes to the inclusion of the wrongdoings each address. Laws stipulate the wrong behavior that can be punished and say nothing about other all behavior. Rights stipulate the wrong behavior against which protections are offered and say nothing about all other behavior.
The rights presumption serves the advantage of those intent on violating and harming, not the people which rights pretend to protect.
All such “protection” is illusory at best. I have no doubt, though, given the other factors involved, that this “protection” was never intended to be anything less than delusory.
All things considered, this is fucking nuts.
And it’s even more irrational than just that.
Bob Black explains in his wonderfully clear new book, The Myth of Human Rights:
Human rights are mythical in the two ways I’ve mentioned. They have no objective reality. They aren’t true the way facts are true – empirically. They aren’t true in the way the truths of mathematics are true – deductively. They don’t exist, as anything except wishful thinking. But they have a point. The whole point of announcing human rights is to motivate or legitimate human action. That’s why I like a line from the comedienne Elaine May. She said she liked a moral problem so much better than a real problem. Human rights are a moral problem. And yet paradoxically, this too is true: “Rights, I have said, do not provide reasons for acting, at least not for the persons who have them… If, in some situation, I ask a friend, ‘What shall I do?’ he has not given me any advice at all, he has not prescribed any action, if he answers, ‘You have a right to do A.’”
Black continues:
As an anarchist ex-lawyer, I don’t sing the praises of the rule of law and legal rights. But legal rights can come in handy sometimes. Human rights never come in handy at any time.
Human rights are just candidates for becoming legal rights. If they become legal rights, then they matter – not because they’re human rights, but because they’re now legal rights. Where they came from doesn’t matter. If they don’t become legal rights, they don’t matter at all.
-- Bob Black, The Myth of Human Rights, 2022, pp. 14 and 19
Black is correct – human rights (or any other kind of rights) don’t matter at all unless they become legal rights.
The Law Scam
Rights are myths in that they pretend a basis in reality when they have no such demonstrable basis, since they selectively displace the natural and logical inviolability of persons with an abstraction that pretends to be its proxy. This effectively and deliberately rules reality out of the question.
Rights “exist” only because we declared them. They “exist” as abstractions, not realities.
The inviolability of persons exists in reality because those persons exist in reality and others see them as precious and hold their preciousness to be inviolable. In other words, people who love exist, so love exists, and inviolability is the judgment of love.
In contrast, although “rights” declarations exist in reality despite the utter void of evidence or evidence-based reason to recommend them, their import and substance are vacuous – missives chock full of empty words that do nothing more to stop evil and violation than to offer a rationale from which to argue against something that should be a given, unquestionable, all arguments irrelevant due to absurdity.
Rights are nothing more than a weak basis for argument that could easily be defeated for a variety of reasons.
Both rights and laws are declarations, so in that sense neither is more truly “existent” than the other. But law does not pretend to be grounded in reality or human nature or God-given privilege or fundamentally unquestionable “natural law”. Laws are wholly matters of blunt fiat backed by violence, cut and dry. A law might be argued that it is harmful, immoral, unjust, or otherwise dysfunctional and wrong – but those judgments have absolutely no bearing and no effect on its legitimacy, its enforceability, nor its implicit justification of violence to punish those who violate a mere abstract construct. This does not prevent evil and violation, but legitimizes it, authorizing evil and violation be done to anyone “convicted” for “breaking the law” with no necessary regard to the actual evil or violation they did or did not do, nor to its severity or extent of detriment.
You will not be convicted and punished under a law for the evil and violation you did to persons, but simply because you broke the law, regardless whether or not you violated or protected anyone, regardless whether you harmed or helped anyone, and regardless of whether the net effect of what you did was beneficial or destructive. You get convicted and punished not because of this or that or other real-world consideration, but merely because there was a law and you broke it – in utter disregard of every real-world consideration.
This is what legal experts call the “content independence of political (legal) obligation”.
It’s what I call an irrational break from reality.
You already know, without knowing anything else, that if we must resort to irrationality in order to justify an idea or a practice, there must be something inherently wrong with it.
So, despite thousands of years of the “rule of law” under our belt – or should I say shackled onto our necks ? – still, our presumably best and brightest “experts” have not yet agreed that people so much as have an obligation to obey political authority, and therefore, the law. The “problem of political obligation” continues to be a problem, and those who believe that we have a “moral duty” to obey the law can’t even agree amongst themselves on a “solution” to the “problem”.
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?
Shouldn’t we at least have established the answer to that question before smothering the globe with laws and legal systems?
In other words, we literally have not known and do not know what the hell we’re doing.
But the SEP article continues:
Another example, just in case that one wasn’t clear enough.
The paper opens with:
The problem that there seems to be no basis for obligation to obey any law – which necessarily means, therefore, that there is no basis for the authority to prevent or interfere with or punish people for disobeying any law – became apparent, finally, because some “theorists of political obligation” actually started asking questions about law’s disconnection from reality instead of uncritically accepting it as a given. Thousands of years of the oppression and violations of law, and some people finally got real about it.
If the law says that X is illegal, then no amount of argument about the merits or dangers or morality or benefits or damage of doing X vs. doing the opposite of X will change the fact that X is illegal, prosecutable, and punishable under that law.
All questions about the justness or unjustness of a law are not valid questions in the first place, because the only reason there is to obey a law is simply, no other and no more than, the fact that it’s a law.
But that was yesterday.
Today, we rescinded Prohibition and alcohol sales became legal again. Now, selling and consuming alcohol is OK, when only yesterday you could get arrested for it. And what happens today to the people who just yesterday were thrown in jail for bootlegging, for example?
So what happened to those jailed for alcohol-related crimes once Prohibition was repealed?
“Few individuals were released after Prohibition was repealed,” Ruth Engs, a professor of applied health science at Indiana University, told me via email. Sentences were generally served out. “They had illegally manufactured alcohol when it was illegal,” Engs explained. And while individuals could request pardons from their state governors, it’s unclear how frequently that actually occurred.
-- Vicki Dennig, “Were Bootleggers Released When Prohibition Ended?”, 2016
So, how did our “experts” solve this arbitrary untethering of “thou shalt” from what actually is?
Simple. They did what authoritarians and psychopaths always do. If a vice becomes a sore point, just turn it into a virtue! If the lack of sane connection between law and reality becomes problematic, don’t solve the problem – dissolve the problem by giving the vice a fancy name and pretending that it’s supposed to be there.
Voila! Content-independence!
No sense trying to show there’s a connection between law and reality when there’s none. Just get rid of the expectation that there should be a connection.
So, under law, there is one and only one crucial concern: did you break a law? Content independence ruled out every other concern from the get-go. Wisdom, benefit, morality, reasonableness, empathy, care, love, intelligence, happiness, and everything else got ruled out as irrelevant.
That’s content independence for ya! Works like magic!
How could this satisfy basic requirements of humanness? How could healthy, uncoerced people accept a way of doing things that rules their humanness out as irrelevant?
Someone needs to explain how eliminating all reasonable, life-loving criteria and replacing them with a euphemized albeit fancy form of, “Because I say so!” got elevated to the status and given the weight that authoritarians pretend for their laws.
What has “because it’s the law” got to do with anything real and meaningful? Psychologically, it’s no different than any other kind of break from reality. The sun is not shining just because someone declares it is. The rain is not falling just because we say so. Things are not as we believe them to be merely because we believe them to be that way.
It is not true that something should be done or not done for no other reason than that a declaration was made to that effect. That claim is false. As the basis for social organization and control, it’s a lie.
Nothing is prudentially, morally, or humanly wrong – nothing is truly, really wrong – merely because a law made it illegal, because all laws are absolutely divorced from real-world considerations like rightness, prudence, morality, and humanness, since law itself is, by definition, absolutely divorced from reality.
Yet, under law, human behavior becomes “criminal” and just as easily stops being “criminal” only and for no other reason than that the law says so.
So, not only does law violate us, it violates reason itself.
Law claims that certain behaviors are “illegal” simply by declaring them as such. So? We could say, “Big fucking deal!” but we don’t – do we? We don’t because of two factors that have nothing at all to do with reason, rightness, function, benefit, morality, or humanness.
First, we need to feel obligated to obey behavior rules if the rules are going to have much clout. Lots of people feel obligated to obey laws because they believe that there is a connection between rightness and reasonableness and benefit and the legality or illegality of behaviors under law.
But there is no such connection, thanks to content independence.
So, the obligation we feel because we believe that laws reflect rightness or morality or beneficence or intelligence is fraudulent.
Some people feel obligated to obey laws because a “higher being” says they must, whatever might be “the law” at the time. This is getting closer to content independence, but it requires that there be a separate authority whose will or word is both content-independent and law-independent that establishes obedience to law as morally right. Incidentally, this is the foundation for theocracies.
So, this belief doesn’t help. It just pushes the problem further back into the occult.
The most famous expression of the idea that law-abiding is a moral obligation comes from the New Testament of the Christian Bible, although it does not specifically mention law but, instead, the makers of law. So, although it certainly includes law, it’s far broader.
I can hardly keep a straight face when people cite that passage believing it was actually written by Paul. Despite contradicting everything he wrote elsewhere about law (which is substantial), despite that he did not consistently remain in subjection to governing authorities himself, despite the idiocy of saddling God with the responsibility for the very human, worldly authority by which Jesus and the faithful were murdered as renegades and heretics – criminals – and despite the fact that all law is excluded from love by John the apostle in Chapter 4 of his first “epistle”, Paul supposedly commanded the faithful to blindly comply and obey the governing worldly authorities, and offered no advice on what to do when their law opposed God’s law.
Maybe he never got the memo? 🤣
— 1 John 4:16-20, New American Standard Bible, 1995
There is no fear in love because fear involves punishment, and law involves both fear and punishment. I don’t say that “because the Bible told me so.” No, John and many others and I have experienced the same thing, and he aptly describes it. Your own experience reflects it, I’m sure.
In any love relationship between peers, rules and laws are corrosive to trust and intimacy. Agreements, on the other hand, are not corrosive. Why the striking difference? Simple. Agreements do not violate peerness. Making rules and laws for others violates peerness and, in so doing, violates the persons we subordinate to our rules and laws. You can immediately see what happens when you do this to others – unless your relationship to them is predicated on that kind of subordination which, again, I’d adamantly argue has nothing to do with love. But that’s a different discussion.
So, if there is no fear in love, there is no law in love, either.
But how is “love” even relevant when we’re talking about law here?
Exactly.
Content independence made sure that love and every other important concern of the living and loving were precluded from relevance, by definition.
Love is completely beside the point of law. Love has nothing to do with law, and law has nothing to do with love.
Love is not “irrelevant” and “beside the point” to life and living persons, though, as if it had nothing to do with a world we’d want to live in.
So, it’s not the critics of law who need to prove that law is deficient, detrimental, damaging, and degrading.
No.
The proponents of law as a method of social control need to explain why they chose it, seeing that it’s utterly incompatible with love, and so, utterly incompatible with any world we’d want to live in.
Again, back to the psychology, what kind of person would want to live in a world where love has been precluded as irrelevant?
I hope the picture is getting clearer for you.
Obviously, when laws can be here today, making behaviors illegal, but gone tomorrow, making those same behaviors legally permitted, for absolutely no other reason than that they were declared or rescinded – otherwise, according to legal experts like H. L. A. Hart, they are not laws at all – proponents of law must accept the burden of showing that law is not irrational.
They refuse that burden because they know damned well it’s an impossible job.
I don’t know about you, (although I’m sure my guess is quite good,) but I find this kind of bullshit to be offensive, especially when it’s attended by the theatrics that come part and parcel with the gyrations of law and “justice”. Bullshit violates my sensibilities, it violates my understanding, and therefore, it violates my sense of safety and well-being by violating my ability to make sense of the world, people, and how it all works. Anxiety (just picture: patrol car appears in your rear view mirror, right behind you) revolving around breaking some unknown law (which now even legal experts agree is impossible to avoid) violates my psychological well-being and, if for whatever reason I’m prosecuted, convicted, and punished for illegal activity, it would violate me, spirit, soul, and body, regardless whether I actually did it or not.
In fact, dehumanizing people and violating their spirits, souls, bodies, reputations, and social standing by branding them “convicts” for the rest of their lives is exactly what the authoritarian concept of “justice” is all about.
So, proponents of law as a method of social control need to explain why we should not rightly, roundly, and adamantly reject law as the instigating aggression that violates humanity in that it negates love and violates the integrity and dignity of every person upon whom law is imposed, especially those who obey it.
The very fact that law proponents effectively alienate and exclude love from both discussion and practice is proof that not only is law itself the original violation in rule-of-law regimes, but also that the choice itself to institute rule of law as basis for forming and operating a “civilization” is none other than a rabid commitment to the chief weapon of human violation, making mass violation of humanity permanent and its harm and pain incessant and perpetual.
In other words, authoritarians need to justify their commitment to evil.
Of course, they can’t, because not only do they deny that their enterprise is evil, they contend that it’s right and necessary. But they lie.
So, not only can laws be unjust, not only can regimes which rule by law be unjust, the institution of the rule of law itself is unjust. And this is because, from concept to execution, the forced subordination of humanity to dictates imposed by a quantitatively negligible group of self-declared “superiors” is no less than the worst crime against that humanity that has ever been perpetrated.
Prior to being suspected of a crime, (no one is innocent of suspicion until proven guilty,) these violations of spirit and soul are ever-present and universal, imposed on the good, the law-abiding, the evil, the lawless, and everyone else in between, all alike. The only violations we’re free from prior to prosecution and conviction are bodily violations and irreparable damage to our reputations and standing in society – but not always.
Run from or resist a cop, no matter what the reason and regardless of innocence or the severity of the suspected crime, the cop can injure you or kill you and claim it was justified. Whether or not it will be judged justified after the fact, (again, a matter of narrative evaluation and judgment,) what will that matter to you? The narrative of what you did and what it meant will have no bearing on the realities of the evil and violation already inflicted on you. Even if they don’t shoot you dead, if you run from or resist a cop, without query or qualm or even a tad of question from your family, friends, and society at large, your reputation and social standing and intelligence and integrity will take serious, lasting hits. Merely get taken to jail, regardless of innocence or misidentification or the nature of the “crime”, and your reputation and social standing and intelligence and integrity will still take hits.
This is how stigmatized “criminality” now is after thousands of years of indoctrination and cautionary tales revolving around an institution that has no connection to reality whatsoever.
These are just a few of the ways that law violates and threatens the very persons it claims to be “in force over” with unending, incessant, threat of potential evil and violation which are completely unjustified for everyone who intends to and indeed does obey the law. That means a threat that should apply to a minuscule minority sometimes – those intending to and indeed breaking laws -- is unjustified for the vast majority practically all the time.
This is real, psychological oppression that affects everyone except those who truly care nothing about law, having no regard for it at all. It’s especially oppressive to the very people to whom it’s least applicable: those who want to do the right and good thing and will take pains to make sure that they do, regardless of law. People argue that there are good reasons for law being “in force” over us – like “for your protection and safety” or “for your own good” – implicitly confirm this. In other words, “We know that it’s a standing violation, but it’s necessary to violate you for our/their/your own good.” (Or, the infamous “greater good”.) This holds true even if a law is literally not “in force” – e.g., for some practical reason it cannot be enforced, or the cops refuse to arrest those who break it, or the prosecutor won’t prosecute, or the court won’t hear the case. In those and other cases, a law might be “on the books”, but it will have no more power over us than does the ink and paper on which it was printed.
But it will still have power over us, won’t it – through the threat of stigma and social harm and our internal condemnations of conscience ,merely because it’s “the law”.
Content independence is one serious bitch.
But all that applies to good-citizen types who care about things like reputation, social standing, and conscience. What about those who could care less about law?
Disregard of law is an important point that helps to expose the irrationality of law.
People generally do whatever they want if not influenced by others, whether that influence is coercive or not. Law is useless for controlling those who, in disregard of law (other than seeing to it they don’t get caught), do what the law prohibits and refuse to do what the law prescribes. Law is likewise useless for those who do what the law prescribes and refuse to do what the law prohibits, because ruling them is unnecessary. That leaves those who worry how the law will violate them if they don’t succeed in avoiding arrest and conviction or if they manage to fumble whatever ball they’re carrying in goodwill, and by that incur penalties for illegal behavior despite their good intentions – like speeding to take your child to the hospital – which the law might take into consideration but will not recognize as grounds for exoneration.
So, if law is unnecessary or disregarded by the vast majority of people it pretends to be “in force” over, whether for bad or good, what is its point?
There is a point, of course – one that you might hear from an anarchist there or there, but otherwise remains conspicuously unmentioned.
The real point of all law is classism: the creation, perpetuation, and defense of class hierarchy.
The view that social classes are determined by economics - and, in particular, economic disparity – is false if we assume that the root problem is economic in nature . This is clear because, no matter what form of economy a rule-of-law regime might opt to use, the same class hierarchy will be evident, regardless.
I don’t mean that authorities enact laws that explicitly create a class hierarchy, although plenty of laws get enacted to create institutions and power positions that make the supremacy and might of authorities seem formidable. On the contrary, I mean that the very act of creating a rule-of-law regime, the choice to rule it by law, and the very act of establishing legal systems have the necessary, unavoidable, inevitable, and wholly predictable result of creating a three-tier class hierarchy.
By taking it upon themselves to declare a regime ruled by law and create legal systems, self appointed authorities tacitly take their place as an elite class who, together with their acknowledged and secret patrons, use law to establish and preserve their “right” to elitist status and privileges, to which they declare themselves “entitled”, along with their “right” to deprive a class of “good citizen” workers from same by subjugating them “by rule of law” under their “authority”.
I’m not saying something so simplistic and, frankly, dumb as that they pass laws to establish themselves as the elite class. No, they don’t pass laws to make themselves elitists. The right and power implied by the act of passing laws, any laws, are what does it. Taking the position from where laws can be passed, claiming right to that position, pretending to be entitled and capable to create the positions from which laws will be passed, pressing the claim that the positions are necessary and mandatory – enacting the charade of law and “justice” establishes them as the elite class, and the whole shitshow has only two things recommending it.
First, elitism itself – the playing of roles as if in possession of right and power – which is the inexorable result of supremism (see below), the mentality that induces then leverages infantilism to establish supremacism.
Second, the unjustifiably evil, naked threat of violence.
From the bottom up, elitists use law to form two tiers subordinate to them, creating a “criminal” and “indigent” outcast class, despised by elitists and “good citizens” alike. Then they use these outcasts as “we can do this to you too” object lessons and horror tales to keep “good citizens” from straying into “criminality” or “indigence”, as well as to keep them from opposing elitist authority. Above all, most abhorrent crime that it is, eclipsing all other crimes, elitists make sure that no one, whether elitist, worker, or outcast, can even begin to threaten or disintegrate the class structure itself for any reason.
Kinda what happens when all we sheeple have been rendered incapable of even entertaining a serious, credible thought of beginning something we’ve been programmed to believe is absurd and taboo.
Again, this is obvious. Don’t take my word for it. Classists will tell you themselves. Just watch the magnificent disparity between their hubris, animosity, and opposition, which you’ll face if you forcefully lobby for the removal of their favorite authority or group of authorities or “party” from power. Then compare those reactions to the hysterical, frenzied, hateful, preposterously nonsensical reactions you’ll get from all authorities, all power-wielding “parties”, and all classist supporters no matter what their affiliations might be – law-and-order true-believers, one and all – who, at your mere suggestion of eliminating rule of law itself will instantly drop their infighting and stand together to confront you as the far greater threat.
What? You’ve never seen the like?
Of course you haven’t, because you’ve never suggested the like to anyone, right? Your law-and-order indoctrination prevents you from taking any such suggestion as short of ludicrous.
But I know exactly what reactions you’ll get.
Honestly, so do you, if you’ll just dig down a bit. I’m sure you can visualize the scene and what would happen if you floated the idea. So, you’ve never dared precisely because you do know what reactions you’d likely get, don’t you?
I can only hope that a few people to whom that’s not true will read this essay and prove me wrong in their case. And if you do, when you do, please reach out. I’d love to get in touch.
Otherwise, this is how thorough and deeply embedded the rule-of-law dogmas were planted in all of us, or at least those who did not have uber-radicals for parents.
But you can imagine the reactions that most people would have to a serious suggestion that we scrap rule of law. If you can’t, then experiment with it: suggest it and see the reactions you’ll get. Do it even if you can imagine it. You’ll probably be surprised. Experience always trumps imagination for good information.
Why such strong incredulity, resistance, and even ridicule? Is it because we’ve thoroughly studied alternatives and, as “everybody knows”, found that the cost/benefit of rule of law is far, far sweeter than other social organization and management approaches?
No.
So why does “everybody” pretend that rule of law is the bee’s knees?
An argument could be made that their insistence results from denial, because of the embarrassing fact that no such studies have ever been done, but I doubt that’s sufficient to account for the derision and animosity the idea incites.
No, people freak out over it because, whether from deliberation or instinct, they know that eliminating rule of law would be cataclysmic for the class structure.
“But we need leaders, don’t we?”
I’ve heard that lamentable, forlorn query in dozens of forms over the years from people to whom the possibility of living truly classless has never occurred.
OK, then point me to the serious, rigorous, peer-reviewed work which shows that our adamant adherence to the indispensability of leaders, rule of law, and the elitist-controlled class structure isn’t just a blind, yea-saying addiction.
Oh, that’s right – they can’t. It turns out they know of no such thing. And that’s because there has been no such work.
Sure, there’s been oodles of presuming and speculating and theorizing by philosophers – but how much empirical, even-handed, deliberated, fact-based work has there been that shows their lofty, imposing ideas weren’t just massive brain farts of navel-gazing, grandiose delusion, or syphilitic fever dreams?
None.
If any such studies have been conducted, I will eagerly stand corrected and would love to look into them. Please do let me know if you’re aware of any: millardjmelnyk@gmail.com.
Ostensibly, the treatment of “criminals” is supposed to “protect” the subjugated class of “good citizen” workers and ward it off from bad behavior. But these, by definition, are good, rule-abiding, obedient people. What benefit comes from applying law to people who, with little to no exception, literally don’t need it?
Law does not benefit “good citizens”, at least, as now I hope you can realize.
So, there must be another reason.
I’m going to talk about cults, briefly. As you’ll see, there are striking parallels between cults and rule-of-law regimes.
As is true of all cult conditioning, ideology in the form of doctrine is the diversionary hand that distracts us from seeing what the cultic magician-master is really doing with the other hand. Doctrinal narrative masks a cult’s true agenda, presenting an attractive sideshow that induces members to unwittingly participate in its hidden agenda while legitimizing and explaining away decisions and actions that – apart from narrative bullshit, sophistry, and what I call normalization by euphemism – would be glaring as hypocritical evils.
Law serves the same purpose in society at large as doctrine serves in a cult.
To find out what an organization or movement or enterprise or regime or a cult is truly all about, don’t only listen to what they have to say about themselves. Don’t believe the advertising. Find which questions they will not in any case tolerate, and you’ll have your answer, no matter how they’ve represented or misrepresented themselves, their agendas, and their pursuits.
Inappropriate, disallowed, taboo questions point to the elephant in the room – the actual raison d'être, the hidden rationale behind the hidden agenda of any person or clique or organized group regardless of size. Questions which all sides of an issue alike wordlessly agree to disavow, outlaw, and remain mum about indicate that: a) they are not honest enterprises; and b) they secretly, wordlessly conspired to hide and bury these unmentionables because they know instinctively that such cannot stand the light of acknowledgment, understanding, and criticism – and they know that, once exposed, the truth about them would shatter their whole game.
So, what is the raison d'être of law? What do those who subscribe to rule of law refuse to admit, agreeing it’s unquestionable, even unmentionable?
Throughout the entire enterprise of law – from conception, to deciding how it will be institutionalized and operate, to the creation of “books” of specific codes, regulations, and administrative rules, to real-world “administration of justice” – no matter how controversial, debated, or narrowly settled matters might be at each stage, one thing is always accepted by everyone involved and never questioned. In fact, questioning it warns of a problem in the making.
Everyone in a rule-of-law regime agrees on the class structure – even resistors, reformers, protesters, and revolutionaries.
Everyone agrees that there must be elites who have authority, that good citizens are obligated to their authority, and that criminals are rightly regarded as repugnant outcasts.
There are people who say they maintain otherwise – but, faced with the daily realities of law and its authorities, given the opportunity to stand by and act according to their words, they usually prove that words are very, very cheap.
Just as an example, taxes.
Everyone, even if only marginally informed and intelligent, knows that the United States devotes a shocking, obscene amount of public funds to the organized mass-murdering it euphemizes as “defense” and “war”. How many anti-war protesters and non-violence advocates in fact have refused to fund the very institutions they criticize? How can those who publicly rage against the very machine they fund, whose gears would seize leaving nothing to rage against if they stopped funding it, avoid the charge that they’re utterly hypocritical?
And when I say “everyone”, I mean everyone. Maybe there are rare exceptions somewhere who reject the class structure, reject elitists obligating all others to obey their laws on pain of legitimized infliction of evil, who do not cover their own asses when it comes to a meaningful “stick it to the man”, preferring to let “the man” stick it up theirs. Maybe, somewhere, but I’ve been looking for them for 15 years and have found a grand total of one. They live about 12 hours away from me. I’ve met them in the flesh a total of one time.
To see that it truly is everyone, just try suggesting that this class structure exists in every place ruled by law and that its mere existence is a crime against humanity, then you’ll see for yourself how reasonable, intelligent, and rational the responses won’t be.
I love it when detractors cite “democracy” as an exception to what I’m saying – their so-called “majority rule”.
Well, as they should have already known, the premier “democracy” has not been democratic at all for a very long time, if ever, but operates as an oligarchy, just like Russia. Why? Because that is how elitists feel most comfortable, most secure, having the margin of unfair advantage they require.
This small glitch of democratic nonexistence is irrelevant, however, because even if a true democracy did exist, and even if it did granularize and spread law-and-order elitism across a majority, it would in no way eliminate either the elitist class structure or the violation and evil inherent to rule of law. At best, a true democracy would ensure that at least 40% of a population will certainly be victimized by the evil of law, since majorities of greater than 60% are all but unheard of. Usually, the victimized minority is within 5% or 10% of the majority – sometimes even just 1% or 2% smaller. When voting/representation is split three ways or more, the “ruling majority” can easily turn out to be a tyrannical minority of as little as 30% or 40% of the population and, in some cases, even less.
Democracy, of course, is somewhat less tyrannical than rule by one or a few, e.g., a dictatorship or an oligarchy, but the effect is the same in both of the lower classes. A so-called “direct democracy” might conceivably, theoretically eliminate the worker class, subsuming it into the elite class – at least it would seem so at first blush. Two problems with that:
When and where in the world has a direct democracy ever existed?
Far more likely than eliminating the worker class, a direct democracy would merely morph the middle class into a “minority” class in which, for each issue overruled by the majority, people would suffer evil and violation and pain just like they would in a non-democratic worker class. Issue by issue, the class structure would be solidly preserved, while only its constituency would fluctuate.
Either way, short of a miracle occurring, the three-tiered class structure would have no problem persisting even under “true” democracy.
So, while we’re at debunking classist, authoritarian hanky-panky, what about the “argument” (way too charitable a moniker) that the “governed” consent to be ruled by the elites?
First, an old voice from a thinker who has roundly been denied by many, but his reasoning on this point is sound and his logic impeccable. He has never been satisfactorily refuted:
Here is the quote in context:
-- Lysander Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery: Part Second, 1860
One might argue over Spooner’s percentages (which clearly are ballpark, order-of-magnitude numbers) but not his rough proportions.
Let’s add a modern voice which echoes the old man a bit more concisely
So, to return to the question of political legitimacy as determined by the consent of the governed, it appears upon sober reflection that the whole idea is as fanciful as the unicorn. No one in his right mind, save perhaps an incurable masochist, would voluntarily consent to be treated as governments actually treat their subjects.
"Consent of the governed" and "implied consent" are, straight up, bullshit.
If authority were derived from consent, then authorities’ laws would apply only to those who gave consent to be ruled by them. My consent that would constitute or authorize authorities , putting their laws “in force” over me, would not obligate anyone else to accept those authorities or their laws as “in force” over them.
So then, if consent has been withheld or withdrawn, authorities have no consent-derived authority. So then, their pretended basis for enacting laws and “law enforcement” in no wise exists, because their consent-derived authority does not exist. This necessarily means that in this case, these are not laws at all, because without the obligation to obey – which is the only justification for enforcing law – a law becomes a statement that amounts to wishful thinking. Withholding or withdrawing consent revokes all consent-derived authority to establish laws to be enforced on the nonconsenting.
Elites conceived “implied consent” to create the illusion of consent precisely because authority has no clout if consent must be explicitly given and can be explicitly withdrawn. “Implied consent” relegates the truth – the fact that consent to wield authority was never given – to the murk of the occult, i.e., the obscured and indiscernible, the domain of factors that we think exist but can’t competently grasp. Once we accept the pretense as true, we’re left with no exit. We cannot revoke “consent” that we never gave, and we cannot deny that we gave it, because any real evidence that we gave it supposedly lies in the dark fog of “implied” where we’re not competent to navigate or specify it.
I’m sorry, but this is just too ridiculous for words. However, it is the key gimmick and crux of the fraud of every cult.
If you consent, you agree. If you agree, it's not authority in any sense that obligates obedience and can be enforced, since you can always just change your mind and your obligation to obey the authorities and their laws automatically disappears. If denied the option to change your mind, you haven’t consented at all, you have been coerced. Coercion is the response to refusal, not consent. You can euphemize it as “implied consent”, but with no option other than to “consent” on pain of evil and violation, you have not in any way consented, explicitly or implicitly. On the contrary, you have been extorted. The only consent involved is toward the extortion perpetrated by the authorities and their laws, which in no way resembles consent to their authority and their laws.
If rule-of-law authoritarians would stop their doublespeak and euphemizing – but no one expects them to come clean and be honest – then they’d be clear that the consent “implied” is consent to extortion, being threatened into submission despite any and all refusal of the authority and its laws.
Any way you look at it, if an authority can give enforceable laws that obligate you to obey on pain of evil or violation, it does so regardless of your consent, not because of your consent. The issue of whether it’s expressed or implied is a snipe hunt.
So, the class structure and the way it operates is mandatory in rule-of-law regimes. “Consent” has nothing to do with it.
The classism as I’m pointing out is not even remotely a post-WWII phenomenon.
Let us go back and distinguish between the two things that we want to do; for we want to do two things in modern society. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. You cannot train them for both in the time that you have at your disposal. They must make a selection, and you must make a selection. I do not mean to say that in the manual training there must not be an element of liberal training; neither am I hostile to the idea that in the liberal education there should be an element of the manual training. But what I am intent upon is that we should not confuse ourselves with regard to what we are trying to make of the pupils under our instruction. We are either trying to make liberally-educated persons out of them, or we are trying to make skillful servants of society along mechanical lines, or else we do not know what we are trying to do.
-- 28th President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, “The Meaning of a Liberal Education”, Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association (9 January 1909)
Elitists never question their self-entitled prerogative to define and control the classes underneath them. Not only presidents thought like this, though.
From one of Wilson’s most famous contemporaries:
These social engineering sentiments in the United States had their origins in Horace Mann’s promotion of what we now refer to as the “factory model” for the country’s education system. Mann borrowed his ideas from the Prussians in the mid-1800s. Here are just two quotes from Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose 1807 Addresses to the German Nation propelled massive reform of Prussian education, resulting in the system that Mann so admired:
On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied upon with confidence and certainty.
All education aims at producing a stable, settled, and steadfast character, which no longer is developing, but is, and cannot be other than it is. If it did not aim at such a character it would be, not education, but some aimless game; if it did not produce such a character it would still be incomplete.
-- Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, p. 20
In the Bible cult of which I was an avid member for 15 years, possibly the most oft-preached parenting advice was, “You need to break the will of the child, not its spirit.”
“Spirit”, of course, was never clearly defined.
Fichte here is not describing a well-educated citizen of good character – he’s describing a human being transformed into a cultist.
Before the warning, and independent of it, the will of man has already its definite bent. If this agrees with your exhortation, the latter comes too late; without it he would have done what you exhort him to. If this bent and your exhortation are in opposition, you may at most bewilder him for a few moments; when the time comes, he forgets himself and your exhortation, and follows his natural inclination. If you want to influence him at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.
-- Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, p. 21
This is the wet dream of every authoritarian, ever.
John Taylor Gatto describes how this was implemented:
The devastating defeat by Napoleon at Jena triggered the so-called Prussian Reform Movement, a transformation which replaced cabinet rule (by appointees of the national leader) with rule by permanent civil servants and permanent government bureaus. Ask yourself which form of governance responds better to public opinion and you will realize what a radical chapter in European affairs was opened. The familiar three-tier system of education emerged in the Napoleonic era, one private tier, two government ones. At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen ,' where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command.
The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require. From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these "real schools," learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations—to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain. Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended "people’s schools" where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history.
-- John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History Of American Education, Chapter Seven, “The Prussian Reform Movement”, p. 118
Ringing any bells?
So, they broke the worker class into two sub-classes: professionals and laborers.
None of this is esoteric information. It’s been publicly available for a very, very long time. Gatto published his book in 2000. Most people have never even heard his name.
The rule-of-law three-tiered class structure cannot be denied. Law exists to preserve the class structure and the agendas of elitists. And the fact that this class structure is obvious but rarely mentioned, even more rarely admitted, and absolutely disallowed as a valid topic for discussion by the upper two classes – yet enjoys near-universal recognition by “criminals” and “indigents” and other outcasts, the only class that does not stand to gain from denying it – is strong evidential indication that the whole arrangement is cultish, a fraud.
Law serves the same structural role and purpose in social management/governance as money does in economics: the interjection of an artificial, abstract, and – here’s the real rub – easily manipulated layer of human construct into the mental-sociological environment in order to separate real people from each other and to separate all of us from reality by forcing us to deal with unquestioned collective fantasies that mediate every socio-economic interaction and that the elite class can manipulate to advantage.
Further, law admittedly and always is all and only about forcing persons. Laws have no bearing on people and no power over them unless they are “in force” over those people. Subjecting otherwise free people under a regime where those in power can with impunity force evil and violation on others simply by legitimizing them declaring them to be laws, justified by a narrative derived from their monopoly on violence, is itself a violation of the highest order possible.
Disguising and obfuscating these FUBARs of good sense are the whole reason for conjuring up the vapid hogwash of “content independence”.
If human behavior were judged in terms of its results and their merits, we’d have to ask the question, “Did doing X in this case result in benefit or harm, and to what degree, and in what proportion?” along with its compliment, “Would avoiding X in this case have resulted in benefit or harm, and to what degree, and in what proportion?”
Without answers to both those questions, how could any of us – elite or otherwise – judge whether doing X would be better than avoiding X in that case? How could X be judged as permissible or prohibited in any way that wasn’t completely arbitrary? How could any of us know whether a law will in fact actually protect and benefit or violate and harm real persons without knowing the answers to both questions? And if we don’t have those answers in specific cases, how the hell can we conscience generalizing prescriptions and prohibitions into laws over whole classes of cases?
I have not found a credible explanation for this situation.
Yet, the mere fact that we instituted a law determines the legality of X in abject ignorance of actual cases of X over which the law will be in force. I say “abject ignorance”, because at the point when a law is enacted, none of those cases have happened yet.
This misdirect features centrally in Larry Alexander’s and Emily Sherwin’s 1994 paper, “The Deceptive Nature of Rules”, which shows that a “serious” law or a rule, if it is to have any degree of power, must to that degree deceive those over whom it’s in force.
What is a “serious rule”?
A serious rule, as opposed to a rule of thumb, is one that dictates the course of action to be taken in all cases that fall within its terms. For example, suppose there are rules in effect that tell us not to park in private driveways and not to appear in public without clothes. If we take these as serious rules, we take them to mean that we should follow them without further thought-that respecting private property, or wearing clothes, is the right choice for all of us in every case. And sometimes, at least, we do follow rules in this unthinking way.
(page 1192)
We could also say that a serious rule is a rule which implies an obligation to obey it or face punitive consequences.
In fact, rules do not identify the best course of action in every case: they are overgeneralizations, and often quite consciously so. Yet rule-makers seldom explain the character of rules, and they expect, or at least hope, that the audience of rule-followers will accept them as serious rules. In this sense, rule-makers "lie" to rulefollowers, a fact with serious practical and moral consequences.
We use the term "lie" loosely, but deliberately. The promulgation of a rule is not a lie in the ordinary sense, and the public certainly does not take all rules as "true." Indeed, rules, as such, cannot be true or false: they are norms, not propositions. Yet the promulgation of every serious rule, such as "In all cases ofF, do A," is accompanied by the implicit proposition, "It is right all things considered that. . . ." That proposition does have truth value; and it is false. Nonetheless, as we shall explain, rule-makers have reasons to hope that rule-followers will take this false proposition to be true and misunderstand the nature of serious rules.
(page 1192)
Thus, a rule often will be most effective, and its purpose best served, if it is understood as a serious rule-that is, as a statement of right action. A serious rule implies that it represents the correct balance of reasons in every case it covers, when in fact it is only a calculation of the best course of action for all actors to follow over a run of cases. There will be cases in which the actor's own calculation is right and the rule is wrong; but if actors in general know this, they will be wrong more often than they are right. Under appropriate conditions, a rule works best if it lies.
(Page 1198)
So, being a particular kind of rule, laws work best when they lie, on multiple levels already mentioned.
Let’s look at the sequence of basic events involved every time that elitists, with the full blessing of their admiring panderers, establish and operate “the rule of law”. This skunk cabbage model called a “rose” in socio-political contexts stinks nonetheless and is no less fetid at any other level of human interaction where it operates: between two people, in a family, in an organization or corporation, in a church, etc.
They decide that they are in a position not only to define what “illegal” is, but to dictate it. Because they maintain that obeying the law is morally right and disobeying it is morally wrong, this means they dictate morality through declaration of legality. Given the entrenched corruption and immorality of people who deign to hijack control over others – most conspicuously, political institutions and their personnel – along with their utter lack of expertise in matters of morality, this is to hitch the chicken cart to the wolf and expect the poor clucks to survive the trip.
They decide that others did something illegal, therefore, “wrong”. Sorry to pop any bubbles, but the definers of justice all belong to the elite class. When an elite commits an illegal act the class often gives them a pass and covers for them. And, in stark contradiction of the idea that justice is judged by an accused’s peers, the percentage of convictions determined by juries – even in the most “democratic” regimes – is negligible. Almost all cases are closed by judgment of an elite class member or “settled” “pled out” by their “officers of the court”.
They decree a law. Whether it’s decreed by fiat, by some kind of collective decision process (council, committee, board, referendum), or by unanimous consensus, it’s still a decree.
They create the means to execute the law and operate those means.
● The means to impose law
● The means to enforce law
● The means to judge behavior
● The means to punish or (rarely) rehabilitate “violators”
At each step, elites violate everyone over whom the law is “in force”.
Here’s how:
First, all four steps represent supremacism.
They could not be taken at all if not for the mentality that yields supremacist behavior, one which we’ve lacked a word for, so I’ve dubbed it supremism. The very act of instituting law is supremacist. To be in a position to institute laws, those responsible must first consider themselves as more privileged, competent, powerful, entitled, better, etc. – that is, superior to those over whom the law will be “in force”.
-- Richard T. De George, The nature and limits of authority, 1985, p. 14
Lip service paid to the effect that the law will be “in force” over them, too, makes no difference, and it’s actually irrelevant to their supremism. If someone wants to institute a law “in force” over themself, fine. We usually call that “self-discipline”, and it’s got nothing to do with instituting a law that will be “in force” over others. The psychology involved in and psycho-social ramifications of doing the former are radically different than those involved in the latter. Boiled down, law institutors believe that they rightfully and necessarily must define and dictate what is legal and illegal, therefore right and wrong, for others. That is to violate human integrity and the human spirit itself, let alone the violation involved in claiming the right to enforce the law and punish “violators”, along with the real-world violations that law enforcement routinely perpetrates.
Supremism violates basic truths by unilaterally subjugating others beneath the supremist.
Supremists in fact are not better, higher, smarter, more competent, more effective, more worthy of privilege. They are not superior. Exactly the opposite is true. The fact that they are not remotely like they’d need to be to wield the kind of power they obsess over and connive and even fight for is the whole reason that they must create and occupy privileged positions which “carry authority” in order to wield it. Without “authority”, no one would accept them as dictators of what is right and wrong, mandatory and prohibited – especially not if they got to know them, their levels of infantility, emotional immaturity, and lack of relevant experience other than the ability to deceive and manipulate others into doing their will.
So, it turns out that “authority” is the hiding place of incompetents and fools obsessed with controlling others to achieve “order” instead of taking the human path: meeting as peers to understand and cooperate and work together. In other words, as soon as differences of view or opinion arise, as soon as problems arise, supremists flip into adversarial mentality and handle it as a conflict in which they must gain the upper hand in order to maintain composure, not freak out, and continue operating somewhat functionally.
This is why courts in the Euro-American tradition operate according to an adversarial model. This is why court architecture is so imposing, why you feel so small and powerless in a courtroom, why the “judge” must be visually distinguished and impressive (to the juvenile aspects of our psyches), wearing costumes and wigs and funny hats, decked out with symbols and jewelry, and why “judges” sit behind ostentatious “benches” physically elevated above everyone else.
This is supremism which, regardless whether it takes place solely in a person’s mind or they behave as supremacists, violates the dignity, integrity, preciousness, and esteem of everyone that they subordinate.
Second, as symbolized by “Lady Justice”, law is blind.
Ostensibly, this is supposed to mean that the law does not play favorites. Well and good as an ideal, a myth – but no one believes that this is in fact true of justice systems. Legal systems and justice systems serve the interests of those responsible for them. Always. If for some reason these systems fail to serve their Makers satisfactorily, their Makers remake them. If they so happen to occasionally serve the interests of the unprivileged, cool – but doing is not a requirement. However, once you become familiar with how courts actually operate – seeing their behavior, judging by what they do in contrast to what we’ve been told they do – it gets quite clear that justice systems serve to remove and insulate the “rich” from their livestock – their peepstock, their so-called “human resources” – that might resist and rebel.
But even as an ideal, a myth, a metaphor, “Lady Justice” lies. Even if she weren’t the poster girl of the “rich”, she isn’t just blind to “a person’s wealth, power, gender and race”. She’s blind to two profound injustices in her supposed upholding of “justice”:
It is not justice to suspect and treat people who are highly unlikely to do wrong as if they were likely to do wrong.
It is not justice to enforce laws on people which have no relevance to them because, regardless of any law or lack of law, they are already committed to doing the right thing. It is just to tell someone who is likely to do wrong, “Do not do wrong.” It is a blindness in the wrong sense – in the sense of being unable to see rather than the sense of choosing not to look – to adjure a rightdoer in the same way that you would a wrongdoer.
Arguments to these two obvious injustices invariably do not disagree that they are unjust and unfair. Rather, they take the form of, “But that’s the best that we can do short of doing nothing at all.”
In other words, these are arguments from ignorance and incompetence.
On the contrary, I contend that doing nothing at all is better than deliberately systematizing and institutionalizing and perpetrating obvious injustices under the excuse of ignorance and incompetence, not to mention promptly turning around from that pitiful pretext to celebrate the failure as a virtue and crowning achievement.
That’s just moronic. I have to choke back vomit at such asininity.
And in point of fact, it’s false. It’s not the best we can do, no more than failure of imagination to come up with a better mousetrap proves that better mousetraps are not possible.
This is not even close to the best we can do.
And there is ample reason to think it’s almost the worst we could do.
I think we’ve been so brainwashed that we’ve become unable to imagine what the best we could do might be. However, as far short as it might be from “best”, “restorative justice” is far better than what we’ve obsessively done so far. In it, I think we can glean directions that might lead us to the best we truly could do.
The “best we can do”, though, is that diversionary hand. “Best” is completely irrelevant in situations where competence is neither contemplated nor required.
What kind of situation might that be?
The kind in which some people take to themselves the right to tell everyone else what to do and not do, merely because they say so.
In other words, every situation in which someone takes control of the means of human interaction.
Law – whether in defining it, declaring it, administering it, executing it, punishing it, or all the above – is instituted in total disregard of the questions of right, competence, or any other qualification that might be argued to make someone a candidate to wield its powers in any capacity, and in total disregard of the risks, rewards, damages, and benefits of imposing its “rule”.
-- Isaiah 5:20-23, New American Standard Bible, 1995
As far as I’ve seen from our histories and our philosophical thinking about the nature of authority, law, and desirable human relations, since the dawn of history itself, humanity has never been in the position where we are now.
We have never before been in a position spiritually and psychologically to seriously explore the possibility of abandoning authority, abandoning law, and abandoning rule itself.
We have never before been in a position to live together as peers, as brothers and sisters and friends like we are now.
Good people don’t need rulers and laws. Evil people need them.
Thanks for this. I like to remember how 4 way stops generate fewer accidents than a lighted intersection. Putting machines between the interactions of people. Now some lights contain spying and weaponized elements. Self checkouts at the grocery also another instance of the machine.