"In a thousand pounds of law is not an ounce of love."
– English proverb
"This is what has to be remembered about the law: Beneath that cold, harsh, impersonal exterior there beats a cold, harsh, impersonal heart."
– David Frost and Anthony Jay
Most of what humanity has considered "justice" throughout history is at best mis-directed and at worst fundamentally wrong. That is bad enough. But making responsibility for administering law the province of governments virulently compounds the problems of acting on flawed conceptions of justice. States structurally transform law from protector of justice into a systematic perpetrator of injustice.
The state is an artificially fabricated institution with a self-claimed monopoly on the "right" to expropriate resources to finance inventing, enforcing, and interpreting its own laws, and punishing violators according to its own criteria. Legal systems are the tools whereby governments rule. To "govern" means to force people to live according to state dictates. It is systematic attempt to configure life to political conceptions of how people "should" be and behave. The fictional state, however, has
no right to rule and dominate anyone. Life does not belong to states, i.e. people exercising artificially contrived power. Life belongs to itself, its Source, and each individual expression of it. From the point of view of reality no "government" has any legitimacy whatsoever to usurp life to itself, nor behave as though living men and women were its property.
insufficient knowledge to justify its actions. Governments necessarily exercise their official force on the basis of incomplete information, partial comprehension, changeable power motives, and already past data.
inability to achieve intended goals. Governments function by coercion. Force does not cure spiritual, emotional, moral, physical, psychological, or social maladies. It does not eliminate the source of problems or provide real solutions. State "solutions" are palliatives resulting from restricting and obligating people.
no money but what it commandeers from those under its "jurisdiction." In expropriating wealth earned by others, states deplete the society they "protect" while effecting the predatory principle against which they were allegedly established to defend.
Vengeance vs. Justice
The "Criminal Justice System" is not a justice system. It is a legalized vengeance system. Government criminal law falsely equates justice with punishment. When a state wants to "bring a man to justice" it means to capture and inflict damage on him. This assumes doing so will somehow right the wrong, pay the debt, or repair the damage.
True justice concerns itself with upholding and rectifying violations of mutually voluntary exchange. Inflicting harm in the name of rules and retribution is not justice, but rulership capitalizing on the emotion of vengeance. To heap damages called "punishments" on unfortunate if not tragic situations does not reinstate what was lost. It does not get to the heart of inequities and restore something constructive and fair. It is simply more injury inflicted on life.
An "eye for an eye" may be just when the impersonal cause / effect functionings of existence result in someone reaping the consequences of his actions. When undertaken by the deliberate actions of men it is vindictiveness and carnage. For men to bring intentional harm to other men perpetuates cycles of conflict indefinitely – if not through the ages. Lao-tzu wrote of such blameworthy futility in terms of the death penalty:
Death is no threat to people
Who are not afraid to die;
But even if these offenders feared death all day,
Who should be rash enough
To act as executioner?
Nature is executioner.
When man usurps the place,
A carpenter's apprentice takes the place of the master:
And "an apprentice hacking with the master's axe
May slice his own hand."1
Inflicting more damage does not heal and mend, remove hostility, get to the heart of the matter, remedy whatever caused an offender to transgress, resolve existential and communication disjunctions between parties, reestablish lost sense of community, or bring all elements of a situation into harmonious mutual furthering.
Governments nevertheless establish "law and order" through organized force, even in "civilized" societies. People directly involved in altercations are disallowed the possibility to resolve differences between themselves. That option is preempted by governments. It implies that everyone is the property of some state, which has greater right to decide life issues than the actual people involved. People are disallowed capacity to resolve conflicts without official interference. For governments to assume the right to define and administer justice implies that law is exclusively a government phenomenon.
Only self-defense, directly or as the basis for others to act as agents on one's behalf, can truly justify use of force. This includes rectification and recompense, which are aspects of self-defense. Because force is injurious interference it is inferior behavior, justified only as a last resort. The state cannot demonstrate any agency relationship with those on whose behalf it allegedly functions, and therefore cannot prove on what basis it is exercising force. "Law enforcement" does not represent individual people, only "society," i.e. conceptions of society of particular agents of state. No one can state a claim upon which relief can be granted against the state or its police for non-protection. Since governments themselves define the criteria by which they "protect" society, state force is ultimately exercised to protect and serve its own rulership status, its own authority, power, and "sovereignty."
The first law of life is self-preservation. A government's foremost client is its own power. The primal purpose of laws and policies is to maintain the state's rulership position, without which nothing can exist for it. Those in the state do not seem to realize that all people are servants. Having never learned to serve life and truth, agents of state (calling themselves "public servants" or "public officials") make harsh masters.
State uses of force egregiously exceed self-defense. Governments' mountains of regulations, laws, and taxes are scarcely last resort deployments of force, regrettably invoked only when all other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted. They are first resort uses of initiatory force, unilaterally imposed on those with whom the state has no actual agency agreements whatsoever. A government is institutionalized "right" to subjugate those it allegedly protects. Self-labeling its actions "official" enables the state to perpetrate to colossal degrees the same crimes it punishes when undertaken by individuals in relatively minuscule scales.
Whether on "official" grounds or otherwise, all pretexts to justify force other than for self-defense crumble when scrutinized. All such guises resolve down to theft, aggression, or domination. Governments from the core out are such abuses of force, organizations designed for some men to have otherwise non-existent capacity to exert force against others. To substantiate their falsely-proclaimed right to use force in ways universally considered illegitimate in all other domains of man's life, governments claim to derive authority from God, higher truth, the General Will, "society," the "majority," etc. This cites as justification abstractions whose realities cannot be placed into evidence or cross-examined in court. No evidence of any agency connection can be produced authorizing the state to act on behalf of such lofty phantasms. All arguments for the legitimacy of governments are fabrications justifying power on the basis of high-sounding non sequiturs.
When an agency agreement exists between a victim (or someone he designates) and those he explicitly authorizes to defend his life, rights, or property, to retrieve loss or attain compensation, there is a possibility for the force used to be substantiated as valid. Only when that principle prevails in the social order can use of force have a sound foundation. When the state kidnaps transgressors and uses their lives for its own motives – having nothing to do with compensation to specific victims – it assumes rights and powers whose legitimacy is merely presumed and asserted. Even someone with a direct agency agreement must limit his use of force solely to rectification of specific wrongs. This is because regardless of how anyone might behave, no one who would administer justice created an offender's life, has omniscience concerning its totality, owns him, or has the right to use force against him for any purpose other than to cause him to right the particular wrongs he committed against specific individuals.
Because of its innately flawed and skewed perspectives the state is devoid of true authority even to undertake force that would be otherwise legitimate. It has neither the right, agency authority, knowledge, intent to succeed, nor honorable means to finance the efforts. A state nevertheless presumes jurisdiction to decide other people's affairs according to its own rules of rulership, falsely called "laws." Disputes are dealt with by the legal system's splenetic mix of abstract considerations and intentional violence. Legal punishment is characterized as a "civilized" substitute for the "barbaric" quid-pro-quo of a literal "eye for an eye" which the state presumes would take place in its absence. What results is even more cold-blooded.
Instead of an eye, a limb, or whatever was actually taken, the legal system removes an "equivalent" portion of a man's life. It imprisons an offender for some term "specified by law," fines him an arbitrary amount (which goes to the state), or even executes him and destroys all his values. This "repayment" by injury instead of reimbursement is intended by some weird logic to equalize matters. To destroy values of offenders who have destroyed values of others is double destruction of values. If someone steals a television, does justice consist of destroying the thief's TV to equalize matters? The only sensible course is to return what was stolen or provide compensation for it.
Injuring offenders is supposed to be deterrence, protecting society by instilling fear in everyone of legal reprisals if they act other than in ways of which the state approves. Any cause-effect relationship between the punishments inflicted on some and the subsequent actions of others is extremely tenuous. "Deterrence" generally includes eliminating liberty, both to punish the offender and prevent him from engaging in further harmful actions while confined. Imprisonment is supposed to teach a transgressor that "crime doesn't pay," cause him to mend his ways, see the light, and repay by pain, deprivation, and the weakening of his body. By seeking to break a man's spirit, humiliate and suppress him, bash him into insensibility, it is assumed he will somehow emerge "rehabilitated." The remaining masses of latent lawbreakers, called "society," are supposed to learn the same lessons by example.
"Deterrence" of this sort departs very far from dealing with persons and conditions as they are in their own right and implementing justice for its own sake. People are made tools – means for the state to "send a message" that everyone had better obey its laws. Making examples of people is supposed to warn and "deter" other uninvolved parties, as Montaigne observed:
"One of the uses of our system of justice is to warn others....We are reforming, not the hanged man, but everyone else." Michel de Montaigne, "De l'art de conférer", Essais, 1580-88.
Injuring people on the basis that some others might learn lessons from it is cruel, immoral, and grotesque. One being tried for some offense could justifiably ask: "What does your harming me for purposes of conveying your intentions to other people have to do with who and what I am or did? You are using me as a device to implement your power at expense of my life." It is twisted and barbaric to inflict harm on someone for reasons having nothing to do with himself, his actions, or justice, but for the purpose of intimidating third parties into perpetual submission and obedience to the endless legalities by which a state rules. Such an attitude towards life is morally bankrupt and wholly without merit.
If the law devoted itself to restoring equivalence and harmony, all could derive whatever lessons from it as befitted their natures and perspectives. Rectification in its own right provides sufficient warning to observers. If the approach is sound, the best possible results will emerge, including the "messages" dispensed. Politicians endlessly proclaim that harsher punishments, e.g. the "death penalty," will send "strong signals." Expecting people to derive true signals from aberrance is irrational. Wrong action cannot send right signals. By equating justice with harm, the legal system validates vengeance and violence in people's hearts. That cannot inspire benevolence, productive innovations, justice, or any other superior values. Faith in state legal systems is expecting justice to flow from structured injustice.
Even extreme punishments do not deter crime. In Old England pick-pockets were hung. Great crowds gathered to watch the executions. Pick-pockets circulated freely through the throng, plying their trade as their fellows were on the gallows.
Now the U.S. is talking about beheading drug dealers, when whether or not someone takes drugs is not the just province of politicians, i.e. uninvolved third parties devoid of direct knowledge and relationship. As Bastiat put it: "Minding your own business is the only moral law." Much of what is called the "drug problem" is government-created in the first place. If drugs were not outlawed, no black market in them could exist. Those who do not fear violence and risk would have no context for the immense profits made possible by drugs being declared illegal. "Drug dealers" and attendant violence would disappear. The "War on Drugs" is a totalitarian ruse to increase power in government. Politicians can "wage" their wars against drugs only by violence, causing more people to be killed, injured, and jailed. This is supposed to be more constructive and "civilized" than leaving people with their freedom, rights, resources, and capacity to work towards finding real solutions out of their own impetus and intelligence.2
Governments grow at expense of eliminating "civil liberties," including rights to personal and financial privacy. The expenses involved in the "War on Drugs" are monstrous costs to taxpayers, i.e. to masses of uninvolved people forced to pay for the debacle. Whenever government does manage to decrease the supply of drugs, prices increase. The added costs to users elicit even more desperation, risk-taking, crime, theft, and violence.
Not only is government unable to cure the drug problem, it contributes to the climate which provokes drug-taking. By trying to structure society on a basis which is ultimately irrational the state officially infuses a profound sickness of mind. Enforcing dis-functional and unethical rules is injurious to mental health. It is not unreasonable to believe that the frustration and loss of control incurred by living under governments disorient the psyche in ways that produce stress and futility and contribute to people's impulse to take drugs. When one is blocked in countless courses of action he would otherwise undertake, and control of life is removed from him and placed in the hands of those with whom he can at best only remotely influence, anxiety and disturbance to the psyche necessarily result.
Vengeance is blind reflex striking back with violence to vent a hurt and frustration it is incapable of channeling productively. This is far different from approaching people and situations with the clarity and caring necessary to get to the bottom of issues and genuinely rectify and ameliorate difficulties.
Stultified by its bankruptcy of conscience, overwhelmed by the inability to master the profundity and complexity of its challenge, the state resorts to automation. Legal systems cannot "punish" people without depersonalizing them into objects. In so doing living, sentient beings are excised of mystery, preciousness, and depth. What the system then deals with is an abstracted characterization derived from various assembled third party perceptions of him. Everyone in the system adds his own perspectives, which progressively build up the model. Like the definition of a camel as "a horse built by committee," it is that model, not the actual person, that is dealt with and "punished." The true reality of the person is disregarded.
Because everyone in the prosecuting and adjudicating bureaucracy leans on everybody else it becomes impossible to attach clear responsibility to the actions of anyone. The impersonal "system" is made responsible, not the free-will decisions of any particular parties. Police leave decisions to courts; attorneys defer to judges; judges consult forensic experts, probation departments, prior court decisions, and an ever-increasing mountain of conjured-up laws and statutes. The net result is craven, cold-blooded, callousness exercising systematic brutality over lives that do not belong to any "system."
Someone may think he feels better because someone who has wronged him is forced to suffer, but the victory is hollow. If one has been robbed, or a relative murdered, imprisoning or executing the transgressor does not replenish the loss. It is immature and unintelligent to make an offender rot in prison for the sake of some emotional satisfaction rather than having him work to repay the losses he caused.
Justice is the skeleton of the social order, essential for a successful community. Isolating and bashing offenders is not justice. Instead of restoring integrity it causes repercussions which make matters worse. Man's interminable consent to his own subjugation is incredible. Perhaps it is some sort of mass Stockholm Syndrome where captives sympathize and identify with their captors.
Collectivized cannibalism
Punitive imprisonment derails lives into stagnant backwaters where the point of man's existence is thwarted. The universal drive to increase the beneficial and meaningful is smothered. That retards the evolution not only of those who are punished, but all of mankind. Society is dragged down by the influences, consequences, mis-directed use of life, and absence of the good that would have accrued to all had constructive justice been undertaken.
In the "Ballad of Reading Goal" Oscar Wilde wrote:
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there.
The legal system has been called a "Great Beast." The police are its claws, the courts its jaws, and prisons its belly. This Frankenstein Goliath regulates life in nation states. People hauled into its lair for violating any of its millions of laws, rules, and regulations – whether or not they have actually done anything injurious to others – are chewed up, swallowed, digested, and defecated. "Society" pays no attention and never looks back.
The late attorney Fay Stender wrote: "The prisons represent a form of pure evil. I am convinced that the prison is a totally lawless agency."3 It cannot be otherwise. To implement brutal force on the basis of equating punishment with remedy, injury with justice, and invented criteria with sanctified certainty, is to operate in the dark with no ability to achieve anything truly constructive or even know what that means. Imprisonment is not productive deprivation such as would purify body and soul and awaken enlightening and regenerating insights, but deliberate infliction of useless, dulling, destructive, life-destroying influences.
By systematically damaging body, mind, and spirit, incarceration severely retards opportunity for improvement and restitution. Imprisoning people wastes their lives and the resources of "society" to pay for it. For third parties, devoid of ultimate moral authority or knowledge, to repress one's life drive for achievement and fulfillment is just cause for resentment. Such mis-treatment can render prisoners more deeply disturbed, rebellious, sullen, mistrusting, anti-social, and less able or inclined to be productive on release. By dishonoring people's uniqueness, merits, and spiritual reality, resentment builds which causes those who have been imprisoned to be often far more dangerous to the very "society" that was tying to "teach them a lesson" and "rehabilitate" them. Meanwhile, victims remain unrecompensed. This scheme may be the traditional approach to justice, and superficially feel good, but is profoundly wrong and does not work.
Costs of incarceration in the U.S. are approximately $25,000 per prisoner per year. This is more than the salaries of a great many Americans, who are forced to pay for the whole mess. Trials cost thousands – if not millions – of dollars. Every "death penalty" automatically costs $1 to $10 Million or more in drawn-out appeals. Expenses of the huge enforcement and bureaucratic super-structures are staggering to the very social body concerning whose welfare the "system" supposedly cares. The process also makes those whose resources were plundered involuntary parties to a system they may consider repugnant.
Confined in over-crowded prisons provides omnipresent risk of being beaten, raped, extorted, or even killed. To degrade people without sufficient wisdom or merited authority is itself criminal. It deepens animosity and alienation in transgressors while crippling their physical, mental, social, and legal capacity to make future constructive contributions and fulfill their lives. Both prisoners and "society" are weaker and poorer thereby.
To say that people who have been punished by the law have "paid their debt to society" is semantic silliness. They have not repaid anyone. They have been extracted of values at further expense to society. Such approach to justice is a lose / lose proposition (except to the state, whose power and coffers are enhanced), not only to those directly involved, but indirectly to everyone. That cannot be necessary, let alone ideal. What is needed is a win / win approach that makes the best of bad situations. Certainly, as a Zen master noted, "An evil done can never be undone," but that does not mean that further evil neutralizes the original one.
Prisons are notorious "schools for crime." They distort the sense of justice inherent in man. Deprived of constructive outlet for time and energy, the irrepressible drive for self-increase is stifled and perverted. Devoid of dignity and superiority, the system forfeits the effect of true moral clarity on the heart, mind, and soul of man. Jeremy Bentham wrote: "All punishment is mischief. All punishment in itself is evil."4 Justice is supposed to represent humanity's deepest values. Constructive confinement for the protection of the community, compensation to the victims, and access to knowledge and techniques that can produce spontaneous, voluntarily chosen change of attitute in the wrongdoer, is the only approach worthy of universal life and a civilized culture.
To legalize force makes its use neither more nor less right. Only correct use of force by anyone (including all so-called officials acting under the purported authority of a fiction called "government") is ever valid. Those who destroy values of others are not relinquished of responsibility by acting in the name of a state. Reality is no respecter of vanity, official or otherwise. Individuals who perpetrate harm are guilty of blame, becoming indebted to those they damage, no matter how much officialdom or how many statutory laws they hide behind.
When law is administered by governments it is impossible for the "scales of justice" to balance, despite the statues at court houses. As arbitrary injurious sanctions formulated on considerations already divorced from justice, punishments never fit the crime. They fit the coercion / obedience system that invents and inflicts them. The state administers its legal sanctions to show offenders who is boss, who is really running society, and that all must "respect the law," i.e. comply with the state's rules of dominion and subjugation. As Lao-tzu wrote:
However a man of conventional conduct proceed,
If he be not complied with
Out goes his fist to enforce compliance.5
The state allows neither alternative sources of justice nor institutions to protect one from it. The maker and enforcer of laws owns the courts which interpret them. One must rely on the systematic violator and destroyer of one's rights to protect them. This is a fool's game.
Because the state is artificiality imposed by force, there is no way whatsoever to equate statutory verbiage, penalties, and punishments to any objective measure of justice or natural law. On what basis can a particular offense (even if it is a real transgression and not just non-compliance to imposed regulations) – unique in time, space, circumstances, and people – be standardized in penalties, e.g. a fine or conjured-up term in some prison? Any such correlation is a function of legislative invention and judicial discretion. It is totally arbitrary.
No government official has any basis for deciding legal considerations but precedents that applied to different men, times, and circumstances, particular world-views, any of an infinite number of ideologies, desires for vengeance, political and career pressures, financial gain, and how a judge happens to feel that day. Those making, enforcing, and interpreting laws have no client to please but their own ambitions and the state who pays their salaries and whose power they serve.
No government "court" has any more basis for handing down a "sentence" than a bureaucrat has of setting the price of a commodity or wage. "Gee, Fred, I think this figure sounds good. What do you think?" Any decision is totally arbitrary. No wonder the political / legal system, which is a disparate set of injurious sanctions on life, does not satisfy fairness, justice, or even either side of a dispute. The system will, must – and deserves – to disintegrate.
Mankind can no longer afford to continue blindly in patterns already established without analyzing what true success is and how it can be achieved. Spencer MacCallum wrote:
At a time when we have entered the moon age, our communities on earth are deteriorating faster than we can maintain them or escape from them. The administrators of our communities are engaged in death struggles with one another, drafting the occupants to do the fighting and the dying, to the music and under the banners of the greater public welfare. This picture starkly portrays the failure of our social sciences. The failure is only underscored by the spectacular success in the natural sciences.6
Politics fails because it pours time, energy, and resources into inexhaustible black holes of illusion. Trying to coerce life into conformities to constructs of how man and society should be is to chase a ravenous and hopelessly insatiable mirage. The natural sciences succeed precisely because they pursue the real, i.e. what is. The state is so far over its head it cannot begin to comprehend how wrong it is.
The core of justice is recompense to the victim. It has nothing to do with severity (or laxity) of punishment. Whatever is involved in achieving just results is punishment enough.
Lax treatment is also default on justice. It is lazy, superficial thinking resulting in ineffective action. It does not evince any profundity, teeth, or competence, or go to the lengths necessary to right wrongs. The fundamental error is equating justice with punishment, whether lax or severe. So long as law functions on an inherently spurious basis futility will prevail no matter how many laws the state creates, how much force and resources are used, or how conscientiously police and courts proceed with their jobs.
Severed reason
The criminal justice system purports to be "rational" by eliminating the feeling portion of the thinking/feeling/acting equation of man's nature. Excising the emotional element is supposed to result in "objectivity." Emotions can certainly distort responses out of proportion – especially negative ones like hate, fear, frustration, and anger. Dismissing feeling for the sanctity of life under guise of objectivity, however, is not wisdom. It is blind obedience to legal contrivances which replace the reverence, insight, appreciation of circumstances, breadth of comprehension, and tempering of life-damaging actions inherent in wisdom.
Plato accurately observed that man's consciousness consists of integration of the various elements of his psyche. To remove feeling casts the already dangerously inadequate reasoning portion adrift, severed from coordination with wholeness.7
This "objectifies" man. It is the source of Nazi and Gulag concentration camps when taken to logical totalitarian limits. Hundreds of millions of people have been starved, worked, and tortured to death in efforts to create state "utopias." When implemented in more "civilized" ways the legal / prison system results. The false premise is the same: society is the province and property of some man-made "state" to structure, protect, punish, and manage.
Detached reason wielding immense deadly force is extremely dangerous. Tyrannies and wars without end result. Sir Francis Bacon wrote: "There is no worse torture than the torture of laws."8 Reason turning its back on feeling loses an alternative perspective of incomparable value. Indeed, it loses its depth. "Feeling" pertains to awareness of content, thinking to form. Life is ultimately lived on the level of being, made aware of itself on the subtlest levels through feeling, and emerges into thinking, rational cognition, and action. To eliminate feeling severs life from ability to be integrated with itself. It seals off capacity to open to transcendence.
Such equivocal, precarious approach to power needs far greater caution and reserve. Such is not the case. Even less reason and intelligence are used, abandoned in favor of mindless conformity to statutory laws and power considerations, conveniently and arrogantly defined as "objective." Utterly enormous power and resources are exercised from an aloof plateau disengaged from anchoring in reality. Vastly more force is used than the intelligence, wisdom, and compassion involved justify. Force is primitive and inferior action, employed out of frustrated inability to perceive clarity or act in honorable ways. It is a very poor substitute for perspicacity and dignity.
Two thousand years ago Pontius Pilot articulated what may be the most important question man can ask, "What is truth?" The difference in the legal system now is that, while Pilot said, "I find no fault in this man" and recused himself (surrendering Christ back to His accusers, the Sanhedrin), prosecutors, judges, and attorneys today knowingly and intentionally function under "color of law."9 As an example of the prevailing condition, an estimated 8,500 persons a year in the U.S. are convicted even when prosecutors know of their innocence and withhold the evidence that would prove it.10 Egos and careers are attached to the game, and those entangled in it relegated to pawns. The rungs of the win / lose ladder of success in the political / legal system are convictions – bodies stepped on and left behind – not the degree to which truth is discerned and constructiveness furthered.
"Due process" is systematized butchery. Those involved do not know what they are doing (are not omniscient), have no right to be trying (the lives they "punish" do not belong to them), and nevertheless administer enormous destruction out of their hollowness. "Law enforcement" does not protect people. It protects "society." Police and courts are agents of the state. Spooner correctly characterizes the state as naked usurpation.11
All those involved in or advocating state "justice" are guilty of the same mistake expressed in all other uses of governments. That is to forsake cultivating inner content and validating its worth in the external world, and providing guidance by example. Out of their inner emptiness they nevertheless resort to organized force, trying to bash others into compliance with what they themselves do not understand and have not achieved. Lao-tzu extolled a superior approach:
Rather, when an emperor is crowned, let the three
Ministers whom he appoints to receive for him fine
horses and gifts of jade
Receive for him also the motionless gift of integrity,
The gift prized as highest by those ancients who said,
"Only pursue and offender to show him the way."
What men in all the world could have more wealth than they?12
Because the state is use of force based on false premises its existence is invalid. The institution itself is inherently wrong, and "better" men and laws cannot perfect it. The players may change but the illicit game remains. Even honorable men playing a dishonorable game cannot salvage what is innately anti-life and structurally in opposition to the laws by which existence subsists and functions.
Mankind is traveling a long course and paying a prohibitively heavy price to learn the lessons of two of its elemental truths: "Two wrongs do not make a right," and "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you." Real justice does exist and there are uses of force which may effectively and legitimately be used to uphold it.
When asked how a realm could be governed by non-governing, Lao-tzu answered:
Be careful not to interfere with the natural goodness of the heart of man. Man's heart may be forced down or stirred up. In each case the issue is fatal. By gentleness, the hardest heart may be softened. But try to cut and polish it, and it will glow like fire or freeze like ice. In the twinkling of an eye it will pass beyond the limits of the Four Seas. In repose, it is profoundly still; in motion, it flies up to the sky. Like an unruly horse, it cannot be held in check. Such is the human heart.13
The state pre-supposes that man can be manipulated, damaged, blocked, plundered, restricted, ordered about, and subjugated with no consequences but meek acquiescence and automatic transformation into the perspective of the imposing force. At best the result is oppression and abuse of power, elimination of options, a sullen sub-par life, and a systematic overriding of freedom and free will. At worst it causes seething resentment, fear, confusion, uneasiness, deviousness, dis-function, dishonesty, systemic conflict, violence, rebellion, and endless wars and revolutions.
The overwhelming majority of people on this planet consciously realize a relatively small portion of their true being, use a fraction of their full potential. "Life is whole-hearted and man is not, and therein lies this endless round." Inability to act out of fullness is the source of both crime and the inept ways it is dealt with. Injury inflicted in ignorance cannot restore a missing completeness whose want is the source of both transgressions and erroneous responses to them. Spheres of mutual deficiency – crime and punishment – become locked in hostile, co-dependent, symbiotic circles that drag both down into a man-made hell that grinds up social and individual integrity and construct nothing. Destructively interlocking domains of error, inadequacy, and injury does not uplift or ennoble victims, transgressors, society, or "officials" who actually commit crime by administering state "punishment." The process does not replenish the inner lack of anyone, let alone restore matters to wholeness of being whose lack is the problem in the first place.
Government "justice" must always be punishment because only by holding out threats of injurious reprisals can a state enforce its rules. The state requires obedience. It does not pursue benefit. It rules, not serves. If it truly served it would have to seek true justice in situations it does not own and has right to approach only to clarify and assuage. No organization could exist with an independent "right" to enforce compliances to its own fabrications. Devoid of its status as a coercion monopoly, the state would completely disappear. Mankind may justly look forward to the day when that non-existence is a universal condition of life.
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1 Lao-tzu, The Way of Life, translated by Witter Bynner, Capricorn Books (New York, 1962), Aphorism 74, p. 72.
2 If those of falsely presumed omniscience truly wanted to help in the drug problem, they could do something constructive instead of endlessly preaching and mindlessly resorting to official force. They could offer superior alternatives, or at least perform research and/or compile information on what various drugs actually do to human psychology and physiology, and publish papers, write books, or make movies on their findings. That would enable people who were thinking of taking drugs to have information about the consequences of doing so, providing anyone interested with the means to make informed decisions. Such an approach would preserve the dignity of everyone, save the colossal resources spent in trying to deal with drugs by organized violence, eliminate the blame inhering in the current system, add to human knowledge, and set the correct example of how problems should be addressed and people should relate to each other.
3 San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, June 29, 1986, p. 1.
4 Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789.
5 Lao-tzu, op cit., from Aphorism 38.
6 Spencer Heath MacCallum, The Art of Community, Institute for Humane Studies, Inc., Menlo Park, California, 1970, p. 1.
7 Ironically, Plato's entire system was state totalitarianism. By inventing abstract socio-political orders and imposing them by force, his scheme was guilty on grand scale of the very psychic derangement of which he warned. His error has been perpetuated in all forms of statism ever since, to the great sorrow of mankind. Plato was guilty of his own cave.
8 Sir Francis Bacon, "Of Judicature," Essays, 1625.
9 Black's Law Dictionary, Fifth Edition, defines "color of law" and "colorable" as follows:
Color of law. "The appearance or semblance, without the substance, of legal right. Misuse of power, possessed by virtue of state law and made possible only because wrongdoer is clothed with authority of state, is action taken under 'color of law.'" Black's Law Dictionary, Fifth Edition, page 241. All "law" of attorneys, courts, and judges today is "color of law," i.e. "colorable."
"Colorable. That which is in appearance only, and not in reality, what it purports to be, hence counterfeit, feigned, having the appearance of truth." Black's Law Dictionary, Fifth Edition, page 240. "Colorable" = "phony."
10 Riverside, California, Press Enterprise, April 9, 1987, editorial page.
11 Lysander Spooner, No Treason, Ralph Myles Publisher, Inc., Colorado Springs, 1973: "Plainly, a man who exercises any arbitrary dominion over other men and who claims to be exercising only a delegated power, but cannot show who his principals are, nor, consequently, prove that he has any principals, must be presumed, both in law and reason, to have no principals; and therefore to be exercising no power but his own. And having, of right, no such power of his own, he is, both in law and reason, a naked usurper." p. 65.
12 Lao-tzu, op. cit., from aphorism 62, p. 65.
13 Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of Laotse, Random House (New York, 1948), pp. 125-126.
Criminal Injustice
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04/05/03
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