Comment by AnthonyMouse
2 months ago
> If enough people stop believing in the law, it really threatens those in power.
I think this is why the thing judges hate the most is people admitting when the law gives them an unfair advantage.
A rule that unjustly benefits someone is fine as long as they don't break kayfabe. Big Brother loves you, that's why you can't install apps on your phone, it's to protect you from harm. The incidental monopolization, censorship and surveillance are all totally unintentional and not really even happening. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Whereas, declare that you're shamelessly exploiting a loophole? Orange jumpsuit.
I agree, but that's the uncharitable interpretation. The charitable one is that intent matters. Those in power being threatened tends to strongly correlate with societal instability and a distinct lack of public safety. I may not always agree with the status quo but I don't want to live in Somalia either.
"Intent matters" is the dodge.
There is an action you can take that does two things. One, it makes it marginally more expensive to commit fraud. Two, it makes it significantly more expensive for your existing customers to patronize a competitor. If you do it, which of these things was it your intent to do?
The answer doesn't change based on whether you announce it. You can fully intend to thwart competition without admitting it. And, of course, if the only way you get punished is if you admit it, what you really have is not a law against intending to do it but a law against saying it out loud. Which is poison, because then people knowingly do it without admitting it and you develop a culture where cheating is widespread and rewarded as long as the cheaters combine it with lying.
Whereas if the law is concerned with knowledge but not "intent" then you'd have a law against thwarting competition and it only matters what anyone would expect to be the result rather than your self-proclaimed unverifiable purpose.
But then it's harder to let powerful people get away with things by pretending they didn't intend the thing that everybody knew would be the result. Which is kind of the point.
FWIW, laws aren't merely abstract tools of oppression, they're what binds groups larger than ~100 people into societies. And the true fabric laws are made of, is one of mutually-recursive belief, everyone's expectation that everyone else expects they're subject to them. Threaten that belief, the system stops working. The system stops working, everyone starves, or worse.
The way you're supposed to do that is by having laws that are actually reasonable and uniformly applied.
Having laws that tilt the playing field and then punishing anyone who admits the emperor has no clothes is just censorship. People still figure it out. Only then they get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything, which causes the corruption to spread instead of being opposed, until the rot reaches the foundation. And that's what causes "everyone starves, or worse."
> And that's what causes "everyone starves, or worse."
I disagree. What you've described is certainly bad for much of society, but it represents a change from full participatory democracy to narrower and ultimately aristocratic governance. Many nations moved away from aristocracy and embraced democracy, but the difference in failure mode between "good for the people" and "good for the nation" does nevertheless exist (even when you can avoid the other problem democracy has, that "good for the people" and "popular" are also sometimes different).
When nobody can even "get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything", then you get all the examples of groupthink failure. Usually even this is limited to lots of people, rather than everyone, starving, but given the human response to mass starvation is to leave the area, I think this should count as "everyone starves" even if it's not literally everyone.
When everyone knows the rules are optional, or when they think facts and opinions are indistinguishable, then things like speed limits, red lights, which side of the road you're supposed to be on, purchasing goods and services rather than stealing them, all these things become mere suggestions. This is found in anarchies, or a prelude to/consequence of a civil war. There can be colossal losses, large scale displacement of the population to avoid starvation, though I think it would be fair to categorise this as "everyone starves" even if not literally for the same reason as the previous case.
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