"Justifying Anarchy" by guest writer Karl G.

Laws in themselves are irresponsible acts of interference with the natural discourse of humanity.
Think about it.
The other day I was watching one of those public message commercials on television, the kind designed to keep people off drugs, in school, and off the streets that typically just make you want to cheat, steal, rape, lie, and shoot up more than any peer pressure ever could. This particular message exhibited a young man slamming shut his Venetian blinds, something he seemed to have about fifty of, and cloistering himself in a dark, sparsely furnished apartment, hyperventilating and weeping into his hands. Between shots a black screen appeared delivering a segmented message that read with an deep and ominous Dirty Harry voiceover, “You can hide from the police-” “You can hide from everyone-” “ But you can’t hide from your guilt.”
It ended with a overly on-the-nose “Don’t break the law.”
Always in the past I’ve given Montesquieu his due, and Rousseau too, and admitted that for society to work we must create a bargaining system for our existence, a social contract as they put it.
This commercial with inverse intent, however, made me debate otherwise.
The man in the commercial, really more of a boy than a man, was the victim to me. I did not know his crime. I did not know his motives. All I knew was that he felt guilt, and terror forthcoming from that guilt. Why, though, must he feel this way?
Accepting that humanity is subject to rules and compulsions of it’s own that, despite any law, we frequent without refrain, I submit that there is a point at which laws ability to better humanity becomes toxic and obsolete. We no longer feel right and wrong from our hearts, but from our heads that judge according to consequences set by man. Nature provided man the brain to both feel and think, however law expect him only to think.
The boy in the commercial presumably broke the law, and, as the commercial explained, was racked with the guilt from it, an inescapable consequence. Who knows what he will do next? Desperate times call for desperate measures so a man of desperation knows no bounds. He will obey no law and he will not obey his own heart. He has, by accepting the rule of law, departed from the world where his heart had a say and when if’s became when’s and a dilemma forced him to break the law, he then left the world where the loose leashes of law could guide his decisions.
“You always have a choice.” people say to me. Well I don’t know about the young man in the commercial, but I’m sure all of us have found ourselves in a forked stick of our own cutting where there just was no good way out. Nature provided us with self preservation, not laws. Our ability to preserve ours and our own is vaster than the domain of legislature. Ere go, the possibility of breaking the law is always going to be larger than the possibility of not. Laws are unbending, however, and accommodate very little for baser humanity. Self defense is a single term in a dictionary of legal condemnations, and, in the end, the ambient level of negative outcomes is going to be higher because it’s more likely to break the law. Because of the social order that dictates shame and guilt to flow from any lawbreaking we’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t; get caught that is.
So my conclusion is that laws are not the enforcer of a better humankind, but rather a foolish attempt to regulate with precision an imprecise existence. To abide and enforce these regulation from which coarse the greater part of negativity, fear, guilt, and the myriad of intrinsically damaging emotions upon humanity is nothing short of a criminal act in itself, one of irresponsibility and neglect towards ones fellow man.
So I have not a call to arms, for surely I see the benefit of contrast. To continue, humanity needs oppression to push against. Rather I have an argument to instill doubt, to convince those who would uphold right that Lady Justice and Master Law do not walk hand in hand, and the betterment of the world doesn’t lie with social norms or even with peace and prosperity, but striding alongside the knifes edge with the outlaw, the dregs of society, and, if you can take your place, the intellectual who sees that the wrong thing is sometimes the right thing to do. In the best of both worlds, Right makes the Law her bitch.