Comment on I really want people to learn that laws don't exist in nature
updn@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Laws are really just a social construct, but they are also a social agreement.
Cheaters always exist. It’s unfortunate their cheating will continue to destroy human existence. But that’s why we fight. For laws that we created as a social agreement to fight back against the cheaters.
Can’t be too cynical, not if you want to keep fighting
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Laws suck at catching cheaters. That’s why they are incomprehensibly complex now while cheaters still keep exploiting loopholes.
Practically no honest person obeys the law. They don’t have time to consider all the legal intricacies, and even if they did people would rightfully call them assholes for following some legal duty to rat someone out for failing to do something unjust that is an unintended consequence of how multiple laws interact. Good people find just loopholes, break unjust laws where they can, and find social ways to hold harmful law-obeyers accountable. That’s the anarchic reality known as “common decency”.
Even the practical mechanism by which the current system tries to catch cheaters - by having a judge or jury of their peers judge whether they did anything wrong and treating that judgment as the truth for everyone to be enforced with cops and prisons - does not require laws.
Laws exist to project the opinions of a central authority without that central authority’s need to understand the situation. They are a successor to people having to see the king to settle a dispute because a king who lets his subjects settle a dispute without him is barely a king at all.
Billions of people have existed without laws. If we want to stop living in a world where all law enforcement are bastards, we’ve got to get rid of the laws. Judgment on morality doesn’t take fine print.