Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the first thing despots pervert is the judicial system. From that vantage point, they can usurp power bit by bit. Moreover, anyone who questions a judge is immediately slandered and possibly imprisoned. This is because the legal systems in every nation on Earth have no effective oversight. In Brazil the courts have arbitrary rule. In the EU courts overrule the political system and the will of the people daily. Meanwhile in the US the Alex Jones trial and Jan 6th abuse under color of law proves that the US court system is utterly corrupt stem to stern. No place on this planet can someone expect a fair and unbiased trial. Why? People are people, everyone is self-interested, therefore no one is capable of rendering justice, only self-interested opinions.
Law is the manifestation of the State’s morality. That which the State deems immoral the State outlaws. The justification is always the public good. However, the reality is always that it serves some private interest. If it’s illegal to collect rainwater you can bet someone benefits from that law. Otherwise no one would have proposed it, nor would anyone have worked to push it through. People are too lazy to work for nothing. There is an old story of a king who put a gold coin under a stumbling rock in the road. Then he waited for someone to move the rock. No one did. The coin sat there under the rock because unless there is profit, people don’t act. The same is true of lawmakers. They don’t act unless there is profit in acting. Therefore every law must benefit those who pushed it through.
The courts then take those self-serving laws and enforce them. Doing so normalizes exploitative law. To minimize cognitive dissonance those in the judicial branch grow to despise the people they are tasked with abusing. This is because if we do something bad to someone else, even if by accident, we must align our actions with our mental picture of ourselves, or them… so we change our mental picture of them. We are good people, so they must be bad people since we did something bad to them. Otherwise, doing something bad to an innocent would make us bad people… and that’s just not possible. So the people in the judicial system whose job it is to abuse grow into the role of abuser. This facilitates the perversion of the legal system to the devices of would-be tyrants.
Normalcy bias works in the general population as well as the courts. Moreover, people resist change because each change represents a little death, and the work it takes to replace it. People like consistency. So we could say that people expect things to remain the same, and they actively work to keep it the same. Each step a State takes to becoming exploitative is then locked in by this process. It becomes more normal for the State to exploit, extract, and abuse. Those doing the extracting resist change due to normalcy bias and desire for consistency. Plus the people themselves learn to expect extraction, exploitation, and abuse. Even if we don’t recognize it consciously, we understand it innately and in the collective unconscious. Nevertheless, we hope there is some justice.
People expect the courts to mete out justice. It’s normalcy bias. That means we give courts the benefit of the doubt. The same courts that refuse us that benefit. Add to this the fact that courts are the final arbiter of any question. Law enforcement may be an Executive function but they are beholden to the judicial branch. If a politician gets in the way, he or she can be punished. This eliminates all oversight. The news illustrates that in industrialized countries the political system has become much weaker than the judicial system. This makes the court system the ideal vehicle to launch an attack on any nation and people. It’s an impregnable redoubt with unlimited firepower. Therefore, a faction lacking ethics, humanity, and control of the legal system will get unlimited power. This is obvious… if you look.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
