this all started with me getting up to go to the bathroom, thinking as I was laying there trying to get back to sleep, and thinking that Scientology was a good example of how we'd lost the rule of law, because they get away with everything. So I just wanted to write that down, and it dawned on me while writing about it, that you could only bring down a wacko ass organization like Scientology if you went after it itself, because individuals will just be replaced or re-assimilated once they get out of prison. It's like the way they went after the mob. You can take down one or two guys, hell, you can even take down the leaders, but that just means the rest of the people will take over what they wanted anyway.
It's also like al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. Then I started thinking Borg and ants and flocks of birds and shit. Then I thought of ants and termites duking it out. Then it made sense with humanity and war.
I remember when I was a kid when I got my first computer, it had this cool little game that looked like a piece of graph paper. You could fill in the squares with this blue color, and then hit this play button and they would do all kinds of weird shit.
It wasn't until much later that I learned what this thing, called "Life" on my computer was. It was a version of Conway's Game of Life, which is basically this game in which simple rules produce complex behaviors that look kind of like living things.
I bet the laws of a society act like the rules in that game, and all the events that happen due to those laws are like the various different shapes that you see on the computer graph paper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_game_of_lifeThe thing with Conway's game of life is that there are some extremely simple rules to produce all those cool shapes:
1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
2. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
I bet we can come up with some simple laws, like those, that will produce good situations for all of us. After all, how can someone be expected to follow laws they don't understand? Just try to read this shit, this is just the statutory code of our country:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/I'm willing to bet that few average people actually understand any of those laws. It's OK for laws that are malum in se or that govern crimes that are wrong in themselves, like murder or torture, because only a few people know those aren't inherently wrong. However, for malum prohibitum crimes, crimes that are only wrong because the laws says so, because at various times in various societies the laws aren't the same for that particular thing, then malum prohibitum laws are completely unjust because no one knows precisely what the fuck is going on. How can you be expected to follow a law that you simply don't understand, even if you were totally interested in being law abiding?
Laws really are natural truths, I suggest, because they should be the result of a study of the data (history) and the conclusion of what way we are so fucked up, that if we don't have laws, we'll do terrible things like torture human beings. Lawmaking is really a study of human behavior.
Lawmakers, at least ones who don't make pleas to irrational emotions like fear or hatred, are like researchers developing a new medicine to treat/cure a disease.
Oh well, it's just an idea.
Malum prohibitum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malum_prohibitumMalum in se:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malum_in_seArguing that we shouldn't all be a part of the decision making process, or the debate is like arguing for dictatorship. I could be wrong, but my right to talk about this, just like anyone else's, is not up for debate here. To do so is to create an environment of collectivism that serves the will of a small group or single person.