Laws defy human nature

I’m a criminal.

I admit this freely and without reserve, because I know that you are most… I’m a criminal.

I admit this freely and without reserve, because I know that you are most likely a criminal as well. It’s impossible to avoid really – who among us never tried alcohol before turning 21; cigarettes, before 18; or pot, ever? Who hasn’t jaywalked, parked in a handicap space, sped on the highway, littered, loitered or cheated on his or her taxes? Almost no one.

There’s an obvious conclusion to be drawn from this: Laws don’t work.

Despite all the legislation in the world, people still get in fights, are curious about marijuana (and beer, cigarettes, mushrooms, acid, coke and so on), still break the speed limit, still exploit prostitution and still rob, rape, murder, steal and kill. This isn’t a secret; it’s something everyone knows. We know we’re all going to commit actions that disrupt disruptive the social order at some point, yet we continue outlawing those actions, literally criminalizing human nature.

Many people realize this to an extent, perceiving that we have serious problems with our legal system. Many of these people want to change it. And so year after year, they lobby to pass new laws, change old ones, and so forth. Yet, somehow the system is never fixed. There are always more problems remaining.

There is a better way to do things.

What if, instead of criminalizing actions we know will occur anyway – instead of stealing huge chunks out of people’s lives for making one mistake or bad decision, or happening to be forced into bad circumstances, or for being black, poor or politically radical – we were to accept the realities of human nature? What if we dealt with every problem as it occurred on an individual basis with the individuals involved, rather than a paternalist state choosing the outcome?

This would be a far saner, more human and more effective method of dealing with social disruptions; saner because it would not cause us to choose to deny reality as we do with our current system; more human because it would actually allow people to deal with each other as humans; and more effective because it is the method that has survived the test of time, having been proven to genuinely work by countless state-free aboriginal peoples from all corners of the globe.

Daniel Quinn elaborates: “In every [aboriginal] tribe I know of, [conflicts] are handled on an individual basis (since no two are alike) … what is sought is not the biggest win for any party but the least loss for all parties.”

Imagine it: a system in which conflicts are settled by actually resolving the conflict and restoring the situation as best as possible, rather than inflicting more harm by stealing a chunk of life or money from one of the parties involved.

There are additional advantages that come with abandoning law.

The first deals with the strengthening of community. If every community had to deal with conflicts within it, ranging from truancy to murder, as a whole, then that community would be forced to come closer together. Ties between the individual members would be strengthened considerably and interdependence would increase as they continuously have to work together to solve problems. Since community is something many of us desperately desire, I see this as an important benefit.

Another advantage would be a general increase in real security. Supposedly, laws are essential for maintaining the security of the individual, but in reality, all they provide is a false sense of security. Laws maintaining the individual’s right to bear arms help create the illusion of defense against tyranny, while in fact the government falls more and more out of the hands of the people each year.

And the law certainly didn’t provide any real security in 1993 for the 74 Branch Davidians massacred by their own government in Waco, Texas, without being charged of a single crime.

Meanwhile, communities without law as we know it are often far more secure than modern American communities. That also has much to do with emphasis on cooperation rather than extreme competition, as in capitalist America (see, for example, Abraham Maslow’s study of the Blackfoot Indians), but the point remains that even in a competitive, law-free society, an individual’s security will be real, not illusory.

A final advantage involves corporations. These entities are, to a large degree, already outside the law (see Pacific Lumber’s 300 violations of environmental law in two years), but their opponents are often constrained by it to an unusually high degree. The removal of laws wouldn’t significantly increase corporations’ ability to do harm – which is already considerable – but it would significantly increase the people’s ability to resist them.

Additionally, let me point something out to those who might call me unrealistic. There is a name which is given to social systems which deny the fundamental realities of human nature. It is often applied to socialists and anarchists, but it applies equally well to our legal system.

That name, of course, is “utopia.”

Steve Thomas is a columnist for The Pitt News. He can be reached at sthomas@pittnews.com.