In part one of this essay series, I concluded with the declaration that the law is not a means of enforcing moral ethics, or a conveyance of them, but is in fact a replacement of them. And it is on this point that I would like to elaborate.

Most of us assume, because we are indoctrinated to do so from our very first breath, that the law, as a tool of moral ethics, has to do with willful action and consequence. That is, if your willful action is to break the law, your consequence is punishment under the law. But this is not actually so. When dealing in legality, we are inexorably and necessarily simultaneously dealing in Authority. The law and the authority to enforce the law are indeed corollary…without an Authority to force compliance and punishment according to the law, then the law cannot be manifest. Law, absent authority, in other words, has no consequence…and therefore its commands have no substance, and therefore the law does not exist in any practical sense. Said another way, once people have a choice as to whether or not they will obey the law, then there is no law. The very nature of law is to disregard choice entirely…that’s the whole point. If someone chooses to disobey, then the law shall punish them. That’s how the whole thing works. One’s choice to disobey the law does not get them out from under it…not at all. It merely invites punishment according to the law. The law does not recognize your choice as legitimate, and that is why you are punished according to the law when you disobey it. If your choice was recognized as legitimate by law, then there would be no punishment for disobedience. Punishment exists in legal ethics precisely as a means to nullify choice, not to affirm it. Before your choice can result in a consequence which fundamentally satisfies that choice, the law steps in to punish you. Instead of a natural consequence to your exercise of individual will, you will relinquish your money to the State, or suffer garnished wages, or a jail cell, or a firing squad, a noose, guillotine, cross, electric chair, needle…etc.. At the very least, you spend your days “on the run” and in hiding. In any case, the point is that the law steps in long before any true, natural consequence of your free choice can ever manifest.

But of course this is not what most of us suppose…we are taught that punishment (and also reward) is a consequence of choice. If the law punishes the “evildoer” then it is because he is simply “reaping what he sows”. If he had not chosen to disobey, then he would not have been punished. However, this is not in reality how law works. Obedience, by definition, has nothing to do with choice, yet it has everything to do with law. One does not choose to obey, for that is a contradiction in terms. One obeys legal commands, or else one is punished. The commands are dictated by the Authority; the punishment is likewise and equally dictated by the Authority. Both the commands of the law and the punishment for disobedience of the law are equal manifestations of the Authority. They are One, and man is obligated to it. He will either obey, regardless of what he wants, or he will be punished, regardless of what he wants. Said another way: He will either obey, regardless of what he’d rather choose, or he will be punished, regardless of what he’d rather choose. The command to “obey or else” hasn’t the least bit to to with individual will, and thus hasn’t the least to do with choice. The law is dictated TO man; it is not a product of his will, then, but of the will (and whim) of the Authority, which is predicated upon a collective Ideal into which humanity is to be forced, not Individual agency exercised as choice. Man is born into law—he belongs to it, NOT vice versa. And law is a giant rock which is falling on his head; he may move out from under it, but only by stepping off a cliff and onto the jagged rocks below. In this situation, the choice he makes leads to the exact same conclusion, having nothing fundamentally to do with him or his choice at all. And that’s the whole idea. That’s LAW.

From this, a fundamental truth now becomes clear, where before it was hidden and obscured by layers and layers of misunderstanding, disinformation, misinformation, rationally bankrupt philosophy, and sadistic self-loathing tradition: law doesn’t have anything to do with individual action and consequence. At all. Your actions are compelled, thus denying your will, which denies your mind, which denies your singular consciousness (your awareness of Self), which denies your root individual nature, which denies your existence entirely. Manifestations of individuality, like choice (true, objective freedom) are thus ipso facto illegal…which simply means that they not recognized as existentially legitimate and natural. Law is philosophically collectivist, not Individualist. It compels man against his will by collectivizing him and then directing and defining the collective whole into Its legal obligation to serve the Authority (ruling class). And it compels man necessarily against his will because it does not recognize his will, because it does not recognize his individuality. The law views man’s existence as fundamentally collective, thus making man a function of an Idealized reality, not a rational reality. The Ideal is an abstract, the collective thus likewise an abstract, the collective becomes an ironic monolithic entity, and man the individual is thus forced to live in this dream-reality which the State (the Authority/ruling class) intends to make manifest by coercive FORCE, and the law serves as the blueprint and ethical exuse for the resultant bloodshed. This is how the State excuses its mass murder of millions of men and women on the battlefields of governemnt wars and other places whilst simultaneously condemning every random “lawbreaker”—a tax avoider, a drug dealer, a man operating a barber shop without a business license—as a moral villain to be ridiculed as an affront to human prosperity and progress.

The law, my friends, is not a natural context for action and consequence, as if it is merely an expression of object and endemic human free agency, where we all just get together and happily agree to play by the rules. Without a ruling class, there are no legal rules! Those rules we all followed as kids in our games of backyard sports, or tag, or pretend play, these are not law! They are rules without the ruler…which makes them the opposite of law: cooperation based upon an arrant individual willingness to be part of the game, without threat of punishment, nor any means to effect punishment for withdrawing or choosing not to play, save the loss of maybe a little face, or at worst separation from that particular group of individuals merely due to disparate individual interests, upon which another group may be joined, or not.

This is voluntarism, not collectivism. It is not the State, it is Stateless.  It is not legality, it is morality. It is not obligation to Authority, it is the freedom to act morally.

END part 2