What about the “law”? Isn’t it at least a good idea to try and reach agreement with one another that certain basic rules of conduct with respect to each another ought to be commonly known, and understood? That is a tempting proposition that looks almost indisputable. First, let’s analyze what the “law” is. Briefly, the “law” is a threat or command backed by force.
1) “If you do act A, we will do X. If you do not do B, we will do X,” where X is an act of force
(arrest, and subsequent incarceration, trial, and punishment).
2) “If you resist, we will escalate the force necessary to gain your compliance. We will continue
to escalate the use of force up to and including killing you, if necessary.”
Now, at this point the distinction between who initiated force becomes difficult for most people to see. It is hidden by the very belief in “authority,” which implies the right-to-rule. If I have the right to order you around, and I issue you an order to stop doing something, then you are initiating force if you do not obey. However, if I do not have the right to order you around, and I tell you to stop doing something you want to do, and furthermore, if I threaten to act against you, up to and including lethal force, then I am initiating force against you by making that threat. The “law” is just such a threat. The law itself is an initiation of the use of force, just as any other threat to commit bodily harm is.
Now, it might look different to you if you start from the assumption that the law that is made as an attempt to enforce a universally accepted morality. The obvious example is, “Do not initiate deadly force against someone,” or don’t commit murder. “If you do, we are already committed to using force against you in retaliation.” It is easy to see how people might view that as an a priori justification for responding to the initiation of force. However, that is because the individual confuses his own judgment with that of the state.
It is one thing for an individual, charged by his own judgment with his own self-defense, to issue such a warning. That is honest, and forthright. When a group of people issue that threat, they imply that someone other than the individual has a right to pre-empt the individual’s judgment. They remove from the individual any discretion to retaliate or not, depending on his own judgment. In effect, they are superseding his judgment, and therefore negating it before he has a chance to use it. The group (state) is overriding his sovereignty. It is tempting to overlook that fact, especially when dealing with such a clear case when the “law” and popular morality are in agreement.
However, consider the victimless crime laws, such as the prohibition against self-medicating (the euphemism for using drugs), and we find wide latitude for disagreement, because people disagree on the morality of drug use. Yet the “law” makes no distinction between murder or smoking pot when it comes to the ultimate force it is prepared to use. The only difference is the initial reaction to breaking the “law.” For murder, it may well be the threat of death as the initial response: “If you kill someone, we are prepared to kill you in response.” For smoking pot, the initial punishment might be a citation (in California . . .). However, the ultimate punishment, should you disagree with the state and resist its attempt to arrest you, is to escalate the response up to and including killing you, if necessary, to gain your compliance.
Therefore, each “law,” to be honest, might as well state, “If you commit act A, we are prepared to kill you. If you do not do B, we are similarly prepared to kill you.” It sounds okay when that applies to murder. How does it sound when you consider that it also applies to a parking ticket? So, the “law” against smoking marijuana means, existentially, “If you smoke dope, we reserve the right to kill you.” The statist will say over and over, and with every law (especially the tax law), “That’s crazy. No one is killed for smoking marijuana (or, not paying taxes).” However, people are killed for resisting arrest, which would not have happened if the “law” had not given some thugs the illusion that they had the right to initiate force against someone simply because the politicians wrote it down on a piece of paper and voted on it.
There is no way around it: the “law” itself represents the initiation of force, and the inevitable result of escalating resistance to that threat is death. Most people do not trace the premises of the “law” back to the base assumptions that make that truth obvious. Instead, they operate under the assumption that the “law” is just, and righteous; that it has “authority.” The widespread acceptance of that belief is quite literally a form of mass hypnosis, a condition that allows people to believe they are necessarily acting morally if they only obey the “law.” Years of behaving under that delusion and having it reinforced by cops, others, the fact that they believe they are acting in accordance with the “law,” and the apparent absence of negative consequences for doing so, conspire to harden that acceptance into the illusion of reality.
--Bill Malloy