The Law

‘For a society to function, every single one of its members must abide to all of its laws without exception.’

I mentioned ‘David’ in Closing myself to Change; a man who’s intelligently challenged the majority of my beliefs in the few debates that we’ve had together. The range of topics and issues we’ve discussed in that time are beyond number, but the last conversation we had was after we watched a film called ‘The Dallas Buyers’ Club’, about the true story of a man who started a somewhat illegal business in the United States importing unapproved drugs for the treatment of HIV and AIDS. One of David’s many beliefs is that:

‘For a society to function, every single one of its members must abide to all of its laws without exception.’

Unfortunately, I’m one of those exceptions. I take an odd kind of satisfaction from the motivational message that ‘rules are made to be broken’. But here’s where, as usual, we enter yet another grey area. If everybody took it upon themselves to break whatever laws displeased them, society would probably collapse into anarchy…

With that in mind, I asked David if there were any laws that he disagreed with, or whether he’d ever broken one before. His answer was that, to the best of his knowledge, ‘no’, he’d never broken the law for as long as he could remember. In a hilarious story he told me, he said he once thought he had and so reported himself to the nearest police officer, who then told him he’d done nothing wrong.

In fact, he follows them so closely that when the law was passed in this country that you couldn’t smoke indoors in public places, he took it a step further by quitting.

On the one hand, I admire his dedication and self-control in pursuing what he believes to be just and right; he seems to have a clearly defined sense of right and wrong. However, that raises the moral question I discussed in my posts on ‘Corruption‘, as to how we judge good and evil and whether we can justify doing wrong.

Personally, genuine kindness means more than past actions. It doesn’t bother me much what people do or have done in their spare time as long as they value people above all. As I said in a post about Pain;

‘The other type of kindness is born of sadness and experience. Some of the kindest, most compassionate people I’ve ever met are those who’ve lost so much. Some are ‘criminals’; hard men exposed to drugs and violence with crushed spirits and broken dreams. They above all others understand, when they see what we are capable of doing to each other, that we should love one another as family; not treat each other like enemies.’

I suppose my way to justify breaking the rules is to consider who, if anyone, it affects. I don’t want to hurt people. So then, if everybody took it upon themselves to break whatever laws displeased them, but everybody had the same moral filters as myself, would that still negatively affect society?

As our last conversation progressed, David said to me that the difference between us, in his mind, was that he lives his life striving to do as little harm to anyone as possible, whereas I live mine striving to actively help people.

And by following the law he believes he’s doing the least harm.

But I can’t help but think that his code would apply in a society based completely on equality in which all laws benefit the good of both its individuals and its collective population, but in a money-based state built on the suffering of others, conflicting interests lead to the cut-throat politics that dominate most of the developed world.

And I’d find it personally disturbing to obey that without question. I don’t know. My opinion is bound to be hypocritically guided by my own conflicting interests with the ‘rulebook’ , so you can take it as an opinion and nothing more.

So I suppose David was right. Maybe no society can function properly if rules are broken, but I think you’d have to look long and hard to find one that was perfect enough to follow unanimously.