Truth, justice and taking the law into your own hands
If we can't take the law into our own hands, whose hands should it be in?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchers?)
- Lawyers are professional weasels. General public consensus -- as well as private experience -- is that they are deceitful grasping sneaks and not to be trusted.
- Public servants don't care.
- Politicians are untrustworthy. They are expected to lie. They are also demonstrably detached from reality. Nearly all of them have declared conflicts of interest, too -- party affiliations that inhibit their ability to represent their constituents.
- Police officers are people like you and me, their judgment no better than ours, and they are almost never where they are needed. They cannot be everywhere, and so they fail before they begin.
The only sensible answer is that we watch each other. That obliges us to take the law into our own hands.
Whose law is it anyway?
On another level, the level of deciding what the law should be, I once again ask in whose hands the law rests. Frighteningly, the current situation places it in the hands of politicians and lawyers, with police given exclusive licence to enforce it.
Let's look at the mechanism by which our law allegedly works. There are millions of us, so to mitigate complexity, individuals -- you, me and every other citizen -- delegate our decision-making to a hierarchy of people paid out of our collective pockets to determine our collective will and codify it. It is from us that our government draws the authority to make decisions.
Delegation of authority through an hierarchy of proxies is a scheme for mitigating complexity. It is an expedient only, and in our technological age it is not the only option. It is now practical for everyone who cares to vote on any issue dear to his/her heart. In the presence of political parties, (mis)representative government is an instrument for the perversion of justice.
Even the choice of names betrays the truth: government is about power, about ordering people about. I take exception to that, and the real reason the government doesn't want me to have a weapon is that guns are the foundation of democracy -- the power of the individual to tell the government where to get off.
I have no problem with administration. Roads, water, electricity, core communications, gardeners for public parks, public libraries and hospitals, building codes, vehicle inspection. All are worth paying for and all are essentially centrally administered. Well, water and electricity shouldn't be but that's another diatribe. But government is obscene and to be resisted at every opportunity.