An Anarchist Rants About Fairness

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My own personal observations about justice and fairness.
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SEVERUSMAX
SEVERUSMAX
1,989 Followers

"When kings the sword of justice first lay down, they are no kings, though they possess the crown. Titles are shadows. Crowns are empty things. The good of subjects is the end of kings."- Daniel Defoe

I have noted for some time now that there are some truisms and proverbs thrown around so much that they seem to be cliché. Among the most exasperating of them are the following: "two wrongs don't make a right" and "life isn't fair". Everyone uses those sayings, including in my own family. I really hate these supposedly profound comments, which are nothing but widely accepted excuses and attempts to persuade people to simply resign oneself to injustices. To think that people accuse me of being trite!

Maybe it is my inner Scorpio, but I rebel against such stupidity. Simply because unfairness exists in the world doesn't mean that one should just accept it. On the contrary, one must defy and defeat those injustices wherever they are found. One must stand up and oppose them. I maintain that every injustice tolerated leads to another injustice being perpetrated, thus greatly increasing the inequity of this world. I've never been one to lie down and stomach such evils without fighting back.

Let's look at the rather loaded and biased statement that "two wrongs don't make a right". It is circular reasoning at its worst. It assumes that the act itself is inherently wrong, and not merely the context which makes it wrong. Applied consistently to sex, it would mean celibacy for example. So, if context matters enough to make sex inside a relationship okay, it also suffices to make revenge affairs okay as well. Context and specifically the need for karmic balance require that the punishment for cheating should fit the offense.

It shouldn't, as some real nutcases think, exceed the infraction. A revenge affair shouldn't extend long than the original activity. Turning a husband into a cuckold, for example, isn't justice, it is cruelty. It exceeds the actual finite harm of the act. It is worse than the offender deserves and so should not be the penalty for that deed. Just as mercy is not justice, neither is cruelty. True justice requires karmic balance and mathematical proportionality and precision. It is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. Anything worse and then you really DO sink to the offender's level. Before that point, you do not.

Secondly, the "life isn't fair" comment is absolute fatalism at its worst. We don't need to make excuses for injustices. We need to correct them. We need to fight them. It is high time that people stop accepting the world fatalistically and start working to alter it dramatically. Society is a very sick, unjust place and needs considerable reformation.

The best way to start is to scrap the compulsory institutions of the State and let individuals rule themselves, making their own contracts and enforcing them through the threat of ostracism. The State doesn't rectify crime and injustice. It simply shields the criminals and punishes the innocent. The police often arrest people for self-defense while failing to get there in time to protect people from thugs. Politicians commit the worst kind of abuses and hide behind their power and stupid ideologies to cover their asses.

I believe that people need to take personal responsibility for defending their own life, liberty, and property, not entrust it to compulsory institutions that confiscate their property, kill innocent people, and lock them in cages for not complying with their tyranny.

I'd say that the politicians deserve to be hanged, but capital punishment, while just, has one key drawback: it's a highly political and prejudiced tool that punishes the innocent with the guilty. Not to mention that the use of coercion in such a way equates to at least temporarily functioning like a State. The sooner civil government is eliminated, the better. It is not the violence that is the problem, but the emulation of the trial process and its institutional tyranny.

I'm not advocating revolutionary violence per se, but if the State becomes too financially and morally bankrupt, as well as tyrannical, my usual preference for the evolutionary branch of anarchist thought might prove a moot point. Other, less calm voices might take matters in hand. Then there really will be the devil to pay, but I digress. I respect proper authority, but that is not compulsory institutions such as the State. It is only voluntary ones to which I have freely submitted myself.

Back on topic, I obviously make a point in my stories of punishing characters who have double standards. There's a simple reason for that. I hate all double standards, whatever excuses one might give for them. At the risk of being cliché myself, I'll appropriate one of my favorite mottos: "turnabout is fair play."

On the other hand, I'm perfectly okay with blackmail, because it's a good incentive to behave and one always has the existential choice to say as Wellington did, "publish and be damned." Blackmail isn't true coercion, since allows another option short of violence, just an unpleasant one. Only when one is forced to choose between submission and mayhem, imprisonment, or murder is it true and wrongful coercion. Only if one is blackmailed to do one of those few things that are inherently evil is blackmail in any way evil.

I should also note that self-defense is a separate category from retribution. There is absolutely nothing wrong with self-defense, but it should be defined accurately. Don't call your revenge "self-defense". Call it retaliation, because that is what it is. Far too much of "battered woman's syndrome" is vigilante justice in disguise. Granted, I'm not opposed to taking down your spouse if said spouse is threatening you with bodily harm, even short of death.

For the actual vigilante, physical confrontation stuff, though, wait until the State is actually dissolved to do that. Revenge is justice, but if done stupidly, it doesn't work. As Poe remarked in "The Cask of Amontillado", it's not revenge if you get punished for taking it. In other words, don't be stupid.

If you must pay him back now, use the State while it still exists. It's a flawed instrument and it would be better to be able to do it yourself, but there's no point in getting yourself in hot water while waiting for the right moment to strike (i.e. when the State no longer protects jerks like him). Better yet, wait until that time, because it isn't far off. The economic insolvency of Statism is rapidly catching up to its moral deficit.

In summary, I believe that human beings are the agents of karma. Karma requires balance and is the true essence of justice and fairness. It is high time to follow the old Irish maxim, "let each man be paid in full." I'm not particularly given to saying "amen" to things, but I do to that exhortation. Until any karmic debts are paid, there is no justice.

That's just my humble opinion, but this is my essay and the whole point of this exercise to speak my mind. Like it or not, that's my philosophy about fairness and justice. Make what you will of it.

SEVERUSMAX
SEVERUSMAX
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AnonymousAnonymousover 1 year ago

You are crazy. Nevertheless I will try to reason with you:

Did you know that in the Icelandic sagas there are tons of blood feuds? One person kills another and that starts it. According to the island's unique laws, if a person was convicted of murder, somebody among the victim's family was not only allowed to retaliate in kind against the murderer, they were actually *obligated* to do so. This derived from two things: first, honor had to be maintained, and this meant the victim had to be avenged. Secondly, this was meant to ensure that an individual who was a threat to the community (the island had a population of less than a thousand people, and it was hard enough to survive without people killing each other) would be promptly removed. This was the law on the island because there was nobody like a king to render judgement; the island was colonized by refugees from Norway and Sweden who were dissatisfied with their rulers. The problem with the laws regarding murder and lawful retaliation was that it didn't stop there. Retaliation prompted further violence, and this turned into a blood feud that might last generations. So no, two wrongs do *not* make a right.

"Life isn't fair". Nobody uses this to mean that injustice should continue. When 9/11 happened, insensitivity aside, I'm sure many people said "Life isn't fair", meaning there was no reason why so-and-so died beyond the fact they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But nobody would have thought it was alright to just sit and not do anything about it.

Revenge is not justice. Crime is crime. If I kill somebody as revenge for something, however comparable, I have still killed somebody. The legal system in the US (I assume you are in America) allows people to have a fair trial because nobody is above anybody else. This means that insofar as everybody is equally capable of lying to protect their ass, the word of a murderer is just as good as the word of an honest person in a court of law. It is up to the lawyers and jury to decide whether they think a person is guilty or not. This is why vigilanteism is illegal. If somebody takes it upon themself to administer justice, who is to say they are really doing that and not just hurting others for the fun of it or some other non-legitimate reason? What if they make mistakes because they don't have the full picture? The legal system is meant to minimize mistakes. The founding fathers said it was better to let a guilty man walk than to let an innocent man hang. If a guilty man walks, he can always be tried again (assuming he commits another crime), but if an innocent is hung, there's no going back or remedying that,

AnonymousAnonymousover 3 years ago

anarchy rules!

Jhbrown27Jhbrown27over 4 years ago
It's fair

To think you suck!

SEVERUSMAXSEVERUSMAXalmost 12 years agoAuthor
To the anonymous trolls, let me just say....

1. You didn't prove that it is not circular reasoning. It is, after all, an assertion that offers no factual basis or proof to say that "two wrongs don't make a right", and it assumes a priori that an act which in another context would be wrong is always wrong. You have not offered a substantive rebuttal to this in support of your claim.

2. Same goes for the claim that this is merely an observation. I have noted repeatedly that this expression is often used by some as a cop-out to convince people to simply accept injustice. I have even heard it put in those terms rather baldly. Again, a cliche that has no validity and is used to encourage fatalism. You claim otherwise, but offer no evidence to support your "refutation".

3. You can't prove that a gradual, evolutionary replacement of the State by voluntary institutions would necessarily lead to chaos of the Mad Max sort.

In short, you attack me and my rant, which is admittedly a tirade (I don't pretend otherwise) by holding me to a higher standard and burden of proof than yourself. I never claimed that these were anything but opinions, but you claim that your views are absolute fact. Which of us is being a bit silly again?

AnonymousAnonymousalmost 12 years ago
not so good

not well thought out. not well argued. confused. "two wrongs..." is not circular reasoning. "life is not fair" is just an observation, pointing out the obvious, not fatalism. we have institutions for good reasons. society can't function without them. if we got rid of them and put everyone on their own slowly the injustices would pile up until there was a tipping point and then there would wars, etc., and we would rebuild, slowly, the institutions self-absorbed people like youself wanted to get rid of in the first place. you should read more history and less fiction and save the rest of us the burden of recreating what you and your ignorant followers tore down. we learn slowly. very slowly. we got ourselves out of caves. we're learning so give it more time and stop thinking tearing everything up and starting over is a good idea because it isn't.

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