Dear Friends,
It seems to me, villains don’t follow the law, they exploit the law, while patsies follow the law and are exploited by it. Why? Because the law serves the politically favored unreasonable. Even as the politically disfavored reasonable are trampled under its jack-booted feet. Courts bend over backwards to protect the rights of fiends, like Diddy, while passing default judgments on Alex Jones for wrongspeak. This isn’t anything new. Pericles used the ostracism to get rid of his political enemies. Law is most often used as a way to benefit the strong at cost to the weak. Those few times in history when it has followed justice instead of Thrasymachus, have been beacons of prosperity, peace, and an increasing standard of living.
Law can serve one of two forms of justice, legitimate justice or Thrasymachian justice… but it can’t serve both. In Plato’s Republic Thrasymachus was the chief foe of Socrates. Thrasymachus the sophist argued that justice is merely the advantage of the strong over the weak. Or to put it another way, that those with political favor exploit law to enrich themselves. History shows this to be true. In most times and places law has been used to enrich the few at the expense of the many… and justified as the needs of the many overruling the needs of the few. The Bolsheviks claimed they were righting the capitalist and Kulak wrongs… as they gutted screaming Mensheviks and nailed their living innards to a tree. The trick is identifying justice from malevolence masquerading as justice.
How do we identify true justice though? The idealist judges with their heart while the pragmatist judges by outcome. Both are wrong. The way to identify justice from malevolence is by asking yourself, is anyone suffering a fate I wouldn’t want for myself? Apply the golden rule and reciprocal attribution. Then we can see that no matter how glittering the goal, cutting someone’s intestines out while they scream for mercy, and nailing them to a tree… then whipping them until they tie themselves to that tree by their guts… isn’t justice, but malevolence. Torture isn’t reciprocal to intellectual disagreement, nor does it follow the golden rule. Making such actions clearly identifiable as unjust. Moreover, when law is used as a means to exploit, law becomes unjust as Bastiat warned in his book The Law.
Bastiat followed another detested philosopher, Edmund Burke. Both criticized those who thought they could rationally reorganize society. Then rule it from a central authority. Burke is hated in many intellectual circles today even as Bastiat is intentionally ignored. Because they both told uncomfortable truths to power… that if it’s unlimited it becomes despotic. There are no philosopher kings and there never will be. Because people will exploit the law to their own ends and Thrasymachus will be proven right again. As the French Revolution illustrated in living color… red. The unreasonable Jacobins exploited the law while the reasonable people were exploited by it. Because in truth in most places and most times… law serves those who have the political favor to exploit it.
The old adage it’s better to seek forgiveness than permission only applies to those with sufficient political favor to avoid punishment. Meanwhile the same bungle will be used to justify the destruction of someone with political disfavor. Take for example General Flynn’s fabricated charges of perjury… while there were no charges for Brennen, Comey, or Clapper for actual perjury. Showing that law in the US today is Thrasymachian. It serves the strong. Law either protects the weak from the strong or it abets the strong to take from the weak. How do we make law serve justice instead of Thrasymachus? Stop being reasonable in the face of unreasonable people. Be tenacious. People who refused the vaccine mandate lost their jobs but those who kept fighting are now rich… be like them.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
