I really want people to learn that laws don't exist in nature

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca⁩ to ⁨rant@lemmy.sdf.org⁩

I’m not talking like the laws of physics, yes those exist in nature. I’m talking about manmade laws.

Laws are a social construct! They mean nothing unless someone enforces them!

In the book Lord of the Flies, when the kids are on a desert island with no adults, there’s some inertia initially where they still behave as if adults are watching. Until it dawns on them that nobody is there to enforce the rules and they can do whatever the fuck they want, then there’s chaos.

People still behave as if the law is just some natural force that exists regardless of enforcement. No matter how many times they see the law broken without consequences. No matter how many times cops ignore crimes or prosecutors drop cases they shouldn’t or judges make a bad ruling, some people still have this blind faith that when something illegal happens, it will be punished. Or some even seem to think people in power physically can’t break the law.

I had a fight with someone cause they were posting some shit about how ICE “can’t” enter houses without a warrant and I replied with the meme about how robbers can’t legally take your stuff without your consent. Sorry but ICE can and do do things the law says they “can’t”.

And sorry, but Trump can and probably will interfere with elections and stay in office for as long as he lives and invade other countries and commit full on genocide if nobody stops him.

And people act like it’s an inevitability that Trump and the other fascists will face nuremberg trials. Sorry but it’s not an inevitability. The nuremberg trials happened when other countries successfully invaded Germany and put an end to the regime. It’s not going to happen automatically. It’s only going to happen if there’s revolution or war. Maybe a newly elected government will prosecute these clowns, but I doubt it.

The law is made up. It doesn’t exist in nature. The only thing protecting your rights is a social contract. It is not inevitable that justice will be served. This isn’t just in the Untied States. All over the world, laws are enforced inconsistently. Nothing guarantees the law will work as it is supposed to.

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Canconda@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I get what you’re saying but you’re losing the thread by framing it the way you are. Cuz there’s quite a few layers between animals and fascism and Lord of the flies barely encompasses one.

I read your argument as “People should not blindly expect someone is going to save us from fascism.” Which I agree with.

But IMO the rest of your philosophical argument is besides the point and distracting to the audience.

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one_old_coder@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

The law is made up. It doesn’t exist in nature.

Look at cats, dogs, birds, or ants. They do have their own sets of laws even if we cannot decode them.

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- untorquer@quokk.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  They have behavioral patterns. While they may be misinterpreted when behaving outside this expected patterns, they are not punished for the mere act of breaking the norm.
  
  Abnormal behavior may be interpreted as a threat and other members of the species may react defensively as a result. Ants being the most brutal of this list.
  
  But most breaking of behavior goes unnoticed or is seen as play.
  
  Dogs certainly don’t naturally give a shit about property damage, and they’ll fight anyone who threatens their friends, regardless of status.
  
  But look at different breeds of cats and dogs, or species of bird, these behaviors are not consistent, neither are the results.
  
  They can’t be decoded because they’re not codified, and therefore not law.
  
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- FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yes but thise laws are based in their social contracts with eachother and relies on them to enforce them
  
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  - one_old_coder@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Stealing is wrong, it’s a 4000 years old social contract that we put on a piece of paper because we’re smarter than animals. They have their own mind though that we cannot comprehend, which may explain why we don’t know yet how they enforce it fairly.
    
    Also we rely on cops to enforce laws the same way ants do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_ant
    
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VitoRobles@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
One thing that bothers me is when people go, “They wouldn’t do that. It’s illegal.”

Like what? They’re doing that right now.

Slavery is illegal. But we GOT modern day slavery.

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- FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Or “they wouldn’t do that, people would riot”. People should already be rioting for so many reasons
  
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  - Beehaw_Girl@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    We would riot if rioting didn’t have such dire consequences.
    
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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

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- 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.
  
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Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I don’t think the people you are complaining about actually believe that these things aren’t physically possible because of the law. If I say “ICE can’t search your car without a warrant” the" legally" part is implied. Of course they’ll do what they want, but making sure that people know that what they’ve done is against the rules, gives them grounds to file suit. (Hopefully before a less crooked judge)

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- FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Good luck actually getting these laws enforced
  
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  - Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Trump and MAGA have lost far more court cases than they have won. It’s true that crimes are being committed, but they aren’t being completely ignored.
    
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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Do you… Commonly run into people that think otherwise? 🤨

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- Beehaw_Girl@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Maybe secretly after dark coyotes have consequences for murdering our housepets without a hunting license. Coyote law enforcement swoops in and puts murderous coyotes in prison. “Sorry son,” says coyote police to murderous coyote, “you should’ve gotten your meals from grocery stores & restaurants like law-abiding coyotes do. Hunting suburban backyards for chewy domesticated furballs is illegal in our civilized society.”
  
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  - Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Coyotes definitely know how online shopping works. I grew up watching one order stuff to catch a roadrunner. 😤
    
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for_some_delta@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Someone else has probably mentioned David Graeber. He wrote an article on how people typically behave even without law or threat of violence. The article can be read at: davidgraeber.org/…/are-you-an-anarchist-the-answe….

I agree the law is made up. Also, ethics is not neccesarily the same as law.

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Rhaedas@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Laws of physics don't exist either. What we have are our descriptions of the organized ways in which things seem to work based on our observation and experiment. But a hard coded rule doesn't exist anywhere, which is why we adjust our laws sometimes when we find new behavior through different or better measurements.

To get to your point, laws and rights are agreements within a society that things should be a certain way, and can be changed by the public or those who govern them, positively or negatively. As George Carlin said, you don't have rights, you have privileges. And those can be taken away, even the ones claimed as given by a creator. That's just core agreements, and even they aren't perfectly adhered to, especially if most people aren't paying attention.

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Archangel1313@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Just because someone “can” break the law… doesn’t mean the law is useless. You’re right, that it comes down to enforcement. But enforcement requires that law to exist in the first place, otherwise there is nothing to enforce. It’s a self-sustaining loop.

If that loop is broken for some reason, that doesn’t mean the law is no longer important. In fact, it often means the law is more important than ever, because it is more obvious than ever, that it needs to be enforced. You are watching the consequences of not having that law, unfold right in front of you.

Simply saying, “Oh, well. I guess that law doesn’t matter anymore, since no one enforced it”, is that point in Lord of the Flies when everything starts to spiral out of control.

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- FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I guess my point is that more needs to be done to ensure enforcement. People are still acting like the law is being enforced when it isn’t. It’s never been enforced with 100% consistency, but when the leaders of a country start being able to openly ignore the law, a dictatorship is rising. I’d like people to show more awareness of what’s happening and stop pretending the law is protecting them
  
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  - Archangel1313@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    The current problem is that the ones in charge of enforcement are the ones ignoring the law.
    
    But unfortunately, adding more enforcers doesn’t actually “solve” this problem. The only way to deal with this, is to remove the current officials from their positions and replace them with people who will enforce the law.
    
    In a democracy, that means voting those officials out, and hoping that force isn’t required, beyond that. Because if it is, then a lot of people are potentially going to get hurt.
    
    In the meantime it is important to remember that the law still does protect you…it just takes longer to fight it, than it does for them to break it. Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of what Trump has been trying to do, eventually does get struck down in court. It’s unfortunate however, that before that happens they’ve already done a lot of damage to people’s lives.
    
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antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
When confronted with an unjust law, a good citizen feels the need to disobey it. Compliance with an unjust law is complacency, and eventually you allow it to become part of the social contract. That is why it is so important for those with nothing to hide to oppose any and all unreasonable searches and seizures. That is why all jurors should know about nullification. That is why bodily autonomy, the missing right in the many, needs to be exercised and covered as a religious freedom (TST). It is your civic duty to defy unjust laws.

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melsaskca@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Most people used to have an internal moral code that would lead them down the road of life. It seems that internal moral code has been replaced with “getting money, no matter how”.

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Dialectical_Specialist@quokk.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There’s no law that says you must follow the law either

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- AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  In fact for Americans, The Declaration of Independence spends almost 80% of its entire length laying out the logical and just reasons that the founders were about to thoroughly misbehave.
  
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BradleyUffner@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Humans are natural creatures. Humans created laws.
Bees are natural creatures. Bees create honey.

If honey is considered natural, then so too muddy laws.

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- FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Ah one of those “technically everything man-made is also natural” people. You’ve completely missed the point. The point is the law doesn’t exist independently of people enforcing it. It isn’t some natural force that will enforce itself. It only exists if people enforce it
  
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  - BradleyUffner@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    But laws DO continue to exist even when not enforced. Just look at some of the crazy old state laws that say things like “it is illegal to eat ice cream on a Tuesday while wearing jeans”. No one enforces those, yet the laws are still clearly on the books. Trying to claim they don’t exist is just absurd.
    
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Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Laws may be “made up” but we all operate by them (by greater/lesser degrees) nonetheless.

Especially social laws which we all follow to get along.

So not sure what your rant is about. We all conform to varying degrees, and there are consequences to how much we choose to conform.

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- FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Too bad it’s possible for the fucking president of a country to blatantly break the law at every turn without consequences
  
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- FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  My rant is about people assuming the law will prevail when sometimes it doesn’t. People act like the law is a force of nature that inevitably punishes wrongdoing. Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t.
  
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late_pessimistic@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I agree with the sentiment generally, but not your reasoning in this post. Although to be fair to you, I can’t really put my gut feeling into a cohesive argument here either.

However I did notice as well people seem to overestimate what law can do. I joined an ecoactivist group in my community, yet everything they do is petition the local government to pass or veto something, which obviously then get ignored.

But really even IF those petitions weren’t ignored, drafting a petition is the easier part.

The harder part is aligning power structure incentives with yours, or building your own superior power structures. Otherwise law isn’t worth shit, because power structures such as police or media or courts or Big Tech will prevail using more money, media influence, and thugs with weapons than you ever did.

I am not a tankie, but I believe Stalin was right on this one: “the only power comes out of a long rifle”

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