Thursday Morning Discussion- Rules, Laws and Authority
J.A. Eddy
I once told a friend of mine I could drag a fine-toothed comb through the facts of his current living situation and find at least one crime to indict him on. He didn't believe me, but I asked him if he did his own taxes. He said he did and I said I wouldn't need to look at anything but his last three returns.
The point being made was rules and laws are so byzantine and changeable that it is virtually impossible to avoid breaking some of them. Nobody notices or cares until somebody who thought they were within the law finds himself the subject of court proceedings and a local or national news story. Those sorts of things can make people view rules and authority as potentially arbitrary, and that attitude leads to a growing disrespect. That disrespect manifests itself in ways that prompt the masses and their enablers in government to spew forth yet more rules and laws. Wash, rinse, repeat. Forever.
The explosion of rules is a poorly conceived and even more poorly implemented attempt to create a civil society out of a mass of individuals who no longer reflexively view themselves as part of any community other than those narrowly defined to provide them with advantages over others, either materially or emotionally. The notion of responsibility to the community at large has been eroded past recovery and it will take a serious dose of compounded tragedies to begin to revive it- assuming there will be enough people who recognize the need to do so.
Discuss
Originally submitted as a comment to this post.
The term "Byzantine" was invented for a reason. You've just summed it up.
Confusion in the law can be a problem, because predictability generally enhances social order, while its converse can unnecessarily give arbitrary power to law enforcement and the courts.
On the other hand, efforts to streamline the law must be very carefully conceived, or they can mess things up a good deal more than what they mean to replace. I suppose it is the desire for ultimate efficiency that sometimes leads people to support measures like this one.
but seriously, this is a really interesting issue for me. here at the u of r, there is active research in the theories of human motivation. basically, what the research indicates is that the punishment/reward paradigm (traditional pavlovian conditioning) is a flawed method for motivating people in their own lives. The things that keep people truly motivated are tied to intrinsic desires for a given activity. Making laws arbitrary and confusing only serves to make people feel as if they are no longer in control of their own destiny, that things are happening to them essentially randomly. This has the effect of sapping their motivation and is one reason why central authorities such as communist governments produce populations so uninterested in productivity and community involvement.
But in my opinion, this isn't just a problem with our legal system or tax code, it is a fundamental problem arising in our government in general. The majority of people do not believe their opinion counts at really any level of government beyond the most local. Their is no true redress of grievances available to the average citizen; everything must be sent through the lobbyists. Thus even if there are totally nonsensical laws, byzantine tax codes, etc., very few citizens feel an intrinsic motivation to argue against it or try and change anything because it seems to them so much the product of random whimsy and so far beyond their small sphere of control.
But is there a way out, or is this simply the price we have to pay for living in a large national society? It seems to me that we are already seeing a sea change in national politics away from a low/high taxes, big/small government dichotomy and back towards a overbearing/hands off government dichotomy (though these concepts are related they are not equivalent). Perhaps some day soon legislators will not run on platforms of cutting taxes but rather cutting laws. Or maybe everyone's just moving towards the overbearing side of the aisle.
There are reasons to fear some sort of analogous outcome, particularly if there were ever a perceived or real collapse of civil order. It probably wouldn't be an act of Congress, instead just communities rallying about somebody whom they believe actually can do something.
That leads us to Zach's observation, which I feel is damned close to the mark, but I think the issue is beyond political at this point. Instead, it is cultural.
People on the right enjoy tossing around the attitudes of the lower class minorities as evidence of some sort of cancer in the culture- the lack of respect for police and authority evidenced by the "Don't Snitch" ethos is a favorite punching bag. But I find myself looking at that ethos with a sense of deja vu because it smacks of the basic individualism Americans like to claim as a core of their national identity. Faced with a reality where law and authority often appear random and arbitrary (regardless of whether or not that opinion is justified, and for the record, I believe it is) what response can their society have other than to shun law and authority in favor of attempting to deal with problems themselves? It's tragic that the undercurrent of violence makes this choice so tragic, but I understand the motivations behind it.
As to what should be done? Political inertia is probably the most irresistible and destructive cultural force known to mankind. The American Constitution was constructed in part to prohibit, or at least mitigate, the development of that kind of inertia (btw, inertia can also be called stagnation), but after 219 years the checks and balances put in place seem to have been swept aside. (See the 10th Amendment for an example)
We get the laws we deserve through our bovine indifference, which in its turn is a societal trait. Didn't used to be, but it is now.
Probably the only interesting feature of our laws currently is the relative freedom and immunity from them granted to lawyers and politicians, celebrities and some civil servants.
But on top of the tinfoil hat times, there is a trend toward more and more laws that are finer and finer in nature, because if only we had all the RIGHT laws, we'd have a perfect society. The problem is that society isn't determined by laws. It's determined by people. And if someone's not going to do something, or is going to do something that someone else doesn't like, they are only partially motivated by the law.
John, I'm thinking it's more of a vicious circle. Social outliers make others feel they need to make laws, which in turn make more feel like they need to push those laws, their personal responsibility to society replaced by legal responsibility to society as more and more is minutely codified.
Which in turn reinforces the appearance of arbitrary authority...
Goedel demonstrated that mathematics, if consistent, can never be complete..that is, there can never be a set of axioms from which all mathematically-true statements can be derived. In an analogous result, Alan Turing proved that there can never be a computer program that can look at any other computer program and determine how it will behave.
These results suggest that the attempt to reduce all of life to sets of rules will not be very successful.
I hope Ali is happy, 'cuz I sure ain't...
Looked at in that light, our current state of affairs in the US takes on an unhealthy glow, doesn't it? This notion of attempting to legislate and regulate society towards an ideal just looks like another step down the path of creeping senescence and final collapse.
I want to reject this idea, but it refuses to go away.
I wonder if other places where "smoking is the central activity" are covered under the Vancouver exemption. It's probably a good idea to find out before complaining too much. For the record, I am of two minds on the smoking ban, but it sure has made going to bars more pleasant since it went into effect -- the libertarian (not to mention the libertine) in me objects, however. But given the reality of these bans, I am happy that sensible exemptions have been incorporated into the laws so as not to drive cigar and hookah establishments out of business.
The Saudi 'constitution' is the Quran. Not exactly the kind of document you want to use in trying to resolve patent rights, access to media, or (clearly) women's rights.
What complicates the system is that there is no codification of laws outside a few very narrow slices (commercial law, labor law). When it comes to crimes and torts, the decisions are made by individual judges working on their own. With no law code to which they can refer, they're left with the responsibility of looking for applicable precedent or making it up. The result is a total lack of uniformity, of expectations, of society-wide fairness.
I think 'rule books' can be very useful. The danger is when they ossify society, taking away the lubricants of a minimal level of ambiguity. Rules fail when they become rituals, mere steps to be followed to reach a desired end.
I think that there is a human tendency to seek order--look at any five- or six-year-old-kid, who instinctively wants an orderly world. The tendency is enhanced when surrounded by those who appear to break the rules. That can be an apparently separate justice system for celebrities, but it can also be immigrants who don't seem to known the unwritten rules of social conduct.
We do need rules, regulations, laws, and authority. Just not as much as some would like and more than others would prefer.
But the original story is all about the cultural exemption. Cigar bars are mentioned only here:
In other words, "You're not banned -- yet."
I'm a lifelong non-smoker, and I hate smoking bans. Actually, I like the smell of fine tobacco, hookah bars included. So I'm happy that their patrons can still smoke. I just don't want government carving a special exemption for them.
And then when people realize that their new law has unintended consequences and is enforced with all the finesse of a gorilla in boxing gloves, we pass another law to "fix" it.
What do you do with them then? We do not have coventry. We really only have one single way, imprisonment (well, two, the person's death) to remove someone from society. And that is fairly extreme and regulated by laws.
In some ways, the laws help with that. But as Martin and John pointed out, there is then the exception. The 'oh, we didn't mean YOU guys', or 'it's ok if our friends do it, just not those other guys'.
I understand and agree regarding the upward trend, and I'm not trying to turn this into a screed on how society is going to hell in a hand basket, so I'll let it stand at that.
My question is how do we as a society prevent further micro-nannying at the hands of rule and law makers? My answer is that at some point the mass of regulation becomes so cumbersome that it is finally ignored out of hand by a majority of people. At that point all sorts of uncertainties arise- will it be a peaceful recognition that things have to change, or a violent confrontation with those entities, both public and private, having deeply vested interests in the status quo? Or some other scenario?
The proper civic response is to vote out the current crop of law makers and replace them with people committed to change, but with popular apathy being what it is today can we be certain enough voters will recognize the need to do this AND their ability to make it happen?
This is the trap: government by its actions erodes the respect for law (and government) in the people, who in turn come to view the government as unresponsive, stagnant and irrelevant. This prompts the government to act so as to force the people to recognize its authority, usually by enacting rules and punishment schemes guaranteed to be applied in arbitrary ways, if at all.
This can go on for a long time so long as the economy is functioning well and no real existential threats appear, but what about times when government has to act swiftly with the expectation that the populace will respond with voluntary compliance? Think of a serious pandemic, an outright shooting war, or some sort of armed insurrection of whatever scale. What is the likely outcome when a government lacking the respect of its people attempts to act with authority in the face of a crisis?
I doubt it will be pretty.
Yours,
Wince
....and there probably is.
"The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws." ~Tacitus, Annals
"The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be." ~Lao-tzu
Today I rail against people so fearful of passing judgment they fall back on "Zero Tolerance" policies, multiculturalist political correctness and the like to do their judging for them. I was part of the problem that brought this about, at least in my own small way.
As a start: Remove economic incentives to create new legislative fields to exploit. We have enough lawyers, what we don't have is a limit on how much these can feed at whatever trough they manage to belly up to.
So - tort reform, caps on cash awards, etc.
This occurs, and is happening now in places like Idaho, but it backfires. One can ignore State and local laws, sometimes by common agreement, and only obey Federal laws as the minimum set, but then the Federal lawmakers will then start to crank out more laws in result. Or one can ignore the bulk of regulations and be branded a Dangerous Element [such as the Freemen were] and have laws multiply to account for that.
Rome had barbarian hordes, we have Mexicans. While the hordes were wards of Rome and demanded largesse from the State before they started to sack it all, I don't personally think we have the same to fear from Mexicans or other illegals. I mean, who sacks places these days? Its all about the ethnic cleansing now. ;-)
Its remarkable what optimists - nay, progressives - we all are, hmm? Despite those of us quoting ancients, none of us has simply said, 'Thats the way its always been, what do you expect?'
Curious.
Turn off the electricity in any major American city for a few days. Observe the results. Look up 'sacking'. Compare and contrast. ;)
Ecclesiastes 1:9P.S. What is "happening now" in the state of my birth?
Like so and thus
Besides, I was from the more libertarian/conservative, potato farmer part of the state, not the pretty much former/now defunct Aryan part, whose influence, btw, was much more sensationalized than real.
Ayn Rand, in ATLAS SHRUGGED
I'm not sure there's anything much left to say on the matter but if there is then I reckon you people will hit it sooner or later.
In any case I've enjoyed this.
Like this:
It's funny cause it's true.
And those systems are only going to grow more powerful and far-reaching with time, which means that the State's ability to act with relative surreptitiousness (compared to the Citizenry's ability to find out and spread the word about it) is only going to decrease.
There's going to be less and less privacy in general as time goes by, and I think that overall it will be a positive change. We're going to be recording cops when they pull us over or enter our homes (and sending the data to offsite secure servers so that it can't be confiscated); we're likely going to be recording trials to expose judicial error, bias, and corruption (secretly, if necessary, followed by anonymous posting to the net), and we're going to be recording the rest of the Citizenry around us when they start breaking the laws that matter -- assault, armed robbery, rape, and so on.
Of course there will come a whole new host of problems regarding falsified records, and false accusations of such, but I suspect that those problems will be a lot easier to address, deal with, and resolve -- and not only will the State not be much better situated than the Citizenry to handle them, but, to finally use my original point, there are far fewer agents of the State to do so than there are Citizens.
Furthermore, the notion that citizens will be recording everything everybody does smacks of a police state to me- the ultimate dictatorship as it is the people en masse filling the role of the Secret Police. Somehow, I cannot make myself view that as a good thing.
What's to stop the police from intimidating or killing someone who's recording them? Or, at minimum, passing laws that forbid the recording of police in the pursuit of their duties? Or a judge from ruling that no video not handled by a 'trusted' source is allowable in court because all images can be manipulated so well? And who will have more powerful technologies at their disposal - government or the populace?
We're rapidly approaching a time where there will be no truth, no facts to be had.
I suppose the only good thing about that is you yourself don't have to stick with one identity, either. It's already becoming trivial to establish new IDs that can hold a credit rating or obtain jobs or immigration status, so its only a small step from that to full-blown everyday ID swapping for the regular joe.
Maybe it can even get some small protection as an I:P issue.
I think we agree on that. The law can't help us much there, really. It's a job better left to the soft power of societal peer pressure and the occasional dressing-down in public. When someone's using loud obscenities around kids, for example, a "Hey, pal, pipe down." and a room of angry glares is often pretty effective. More effective than a law prohibiting certain words within a certain radius of children would be and a lot less messy.
That's essentially a return to "The Good Old Days." I think that's desirable in this context, but the populace (at least along the Eastern and Western coasts and in most large cities) has had that kind of confrontational attitude driven out of them, in part by the proliferation of laws requiring tolerance of all sorts of behavior- so it's left to law enforcement to promote societal norms, and they are not up to that task.
The result? Arbitrary enforcement.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.