When Law is Lawless:

One of the central themes in the Corporate Trilogy is that modern theme of Law. My chief contention is this: that there are people who live below the Law, people who live above the Law, and those who live in between. All three groups of people break the Law, inevitably, from time to time, but not all of them understand the Law. Laws, Rules, and Regulations are simply social contracts. Their function is to protect one group of people from another, and only the latter is required to follow them when the Law works well. This fact has been apparent to me for so long that I can hardly function in society without it, and I always struggled to imagine what the mindset must be for someone whose understanding lies beneath it, though I have made it my ardent project over the last four years to develop such an understanding. Some of the individuals to whom I have conveyed this understanding, hoping to find solidarity in Spirit, were themselves criminals, yet I was shocked and outraged to hear my theme dismissed outright, as though I were mistaken for asserting it. I had always presumed that anyone who was sufficiently intelligent to hold my company and attention would be allied in agreement with the most basic of intellectual Common Sense, and this was what I attributed to them as the motivation for their deviant tendencies. Nothing in my education had prepared me to encounter such motivators such as survival, trade, and that most nebulous of social trends: status within a pack. I could understand such drives such as Social Justice, Reason, Science, Philosophy, Friendship and Religion, but those I would speak little of because I had presumed them to be so indispensable and essential that they would immediately be understood as my own motivators. This presumption was not wrong, for though I was disappointed by my fellows I also remembered that it was out of courtesy for them, without which life could not continue, for faith must be reciprocal, that I ascribed to them the same motivations that I, observing the Golden Rule, would for them to ascribe to me. Everywhere I turned, I found corroboration for the Universality of these claims, a binding yet unspoken pact at the core of our common history and precedent over any strictly individual deviations. I was right. But I was not prepared for them being wrong. They did not defy the Law because its Byzantine bureaucracy and blatant imperfections, its historical inconsistency and the drive to constantly revise and to improve upon it, were all so mind-numbing that they simply could not be bothered with it. They did not part with convention on behalf of the Public, but rather on their own behalf, yet this was not motivated by the drive to rise ABOVE the rules. Growing up had once meant this: that one has followed the rules for so long that one has transcended them, and by becoming aware of what they represent one becomes qualified to create NEW, BETTER rules, for both one’s own identity and for the betterment of all beings. Such a striving for transcendence is so essential to Life that it is shocking to imagine living without it. Yet some beings do. Some beings do not regard Law as a social contract. They hate police officers for interpreting it to serve those whose value transcends it; insecure about their own qualification to violate it, they would rather drag everybody around them down to its level, where inevitably this same confusion corrodes it. This is how people become victims OF the Law. A man who blames “slow drivers” for most car accidents on the freeway has simply found in legality a shelter to quarter his own narcissistic bias. Obviously, ALL car accidents involve “fast drivers”, including those who drive at a legal pace but, whereas ONLY MOST of these accidents, by my own interlocutor’s admission, involve slow drivers, and we must employ our common sense regarding physics to assume that every such instance involves the slow drivers colliding with fast drivers coming in from behind. Is it impossible that the Law, written by fast drivers, requires revision? Of course, those who created the Law knew that it was more important to restrict speed than to punish sloth. The tendency to relax the former restriction at the expense of the latter party has been symptomatic only of a loss of sensibility in the work force, wherein speed is somehow rewarded as though it were not only the most effective means by which to be productive (which it is not) but also as though it were an end in and of itself. The Law has come to serve those who lie beneath it, even though they would drive well above its limits. It is time that we remember that its true function was to protect those who lie above it, those few criminals who end up rewriting the law to be more sensible and mature. What I have expressed today has not been a partisan or preferential bias. The identity I uphold is greater than any other in the present day, for it is informed by the entirety of human history, and though not all such history can be accounted for by any one man, any individual who walks the road towards Enlightenment will find cause to extrapolate along these universal lines.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]