Have you ever tried to have a serious discussion with someone on social media, only to discover they are stubbornly insistent upon avoiding any and all challenges to their position? I know this may seem hypocritical to some at first blush. I, too, am stubborn on many points, but I can usually make a decent argument to support my position. Here, I'm talking about someone who just repeats the same nonsense no matter how thoroughly it is demolished.
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The incident which inspires this diatribe was in response to a thread about police using speed limits as revenue generation. The dunce in question kept insisting anyone who got a speeding ticket deserved it. "You break the law then you face the obvious consequences. You have one person on earth to blame for your fault, you."
I intended to write this as a back-and-forth dialogue, but that's the gist of his arguments.
- The law is the law is the law.
- Breaking the law is proof of low moral character
- Things are regulated or illegal because they endanger people.
- If you break the law, you endanger people, so you should be punished.
Every attempt to engage rationally just led to the same cycle of condescending non-responsive appeals to the status quo.
I challenged the presumption of legal authority. Where do legislators get their authority to impose laws? What makes a law legitimate? I tried using examples from history. Slavery was legal, and the Underground Railroad was an illegal conspiracy to deprive plantation owners of their lawful property in violation of federal law. Were they just asking for it when confronted by the slave patrol? Alcohol was legal, then illegal, and now is mostly legal again. Did morality change? No reply was forthcoming.
He kept insisting legal penalties were equivalent to natural consequences. I tried examples outside of legality. Does the victim of spousal abuse deserve beatings just because "they knew what would happen if they didn't do what they were told?" The best he could offer was, "Well, that's against the law." I asked if it was wrong because it was against the law, or if it was wrong regardless of the law.
Are police not also responsible for their choices and actions? I don't want to go full Godwin's Law, but we can't forget that "just following orders" is not a defense. Every dictator and tyrant makes their overreach "legal." How many people have been censored, imprisoned, or even executed throughout history for the "crime" of public dissent? Jesus was executed on charges of rebellion against Roman authority.
It may come as a shock after all this, but I am not actually a proponent of reckless driving. However, arbitrary speed limits in many jurisdictions seem designed for revenue generation rather than the safety of drivers and pedestrians or the design of roads and cars. The laws already say we should drive under the speed limit when conditions are poor, so clearly it's not a guaranteed safe speed. Traffic on the highways usually flows at 5-10 mph above the posted limit because drivers can usually decide for themselves the best balance between fuel economy, travel time, and safety. In the town where I am a librarian, the speed limit is 25 mph on the main drag during school days when kids are in school all day, but 35 mph during the summer when there are actually pedestrians and kids everywhere. It makes no sense if one examines the matter at all, so why does this clown still insist the law is the supreme authority, and its enforcement is always proper?
Appeals to legality are just a lazy way to delegate moral choice and rational thought to the political class and their enforcers, the people who have consistently demonstrated the least acumen for such endeavors. Demands for unquestioning obedience are slavish subservience, not evidence for intellectual vigor. Of course, rebellion and upheaval can also be blind, as G. K. Chesterton wrote in The Thing (1929),
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
And further, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence (1776)
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
However, as I hope I have demonstrated in my efforts to dismantle popular defenses of this particular topic, and could readily expand elsewhere, I agree with Jefferson's following sentence as well.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
I am not a revolutionary for the sake of merely being revolutionary. I have no desire for war and conflict. I would prefer to just play along with the status quo myself most of the time when it infringes little on my liberties. But every day those infringements and demands stack up. Tax day is another reminder of how the government we face today is at least as rapacious as the one cast off by the colonists of yesteryear. Same for the police demanding our papers and imposing fines upon us for non-crimes. Likewise, the ongoing problems of drug prohibition, gun control infringements, and licenses for every economically productive activity. But the government runs the schools, and most people are taught to tolerate this artificial hierarchy.
We don't win by shooting the bastards, we win by finding those who are still willing to think, and prepared to take the risk of living free without permission. If you're there on HIVE, you're already part of the solution in a censorship-resistant press and an independent cryptocurrency. Is it perfect? No. But we already saw practical secession when Justin Sun tried to turn our blockchain into his personal fiefdom. Liberty works, and we helped prove it. Like we challenged Sun's presumed authority, we can also challenge the State.
I leave you with one final quote, this time by Étienne de la Boétie, from The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1577).
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
