Natural Law vs Government

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | JULY 4, 2012

“Natural Law” is composed by a set of moral and legal standards which aren’t written anywhere, but that everyone knows very well. These set of standards aren’t written because they are logical ways of action that served as the guide for the existence of society for many years. The standards are part of humanity, of being human and therefore derive from human nature and the world we all live in.

Imagine a bear, a wolf or a Lyon which grows old and knows exactly when time is ripe to leave the pack to forge its own future. It is within his nature to know when it is independent enough to leave. No one told him it was time to leave and only in a handful of occasions the wolf, the Lyon or the bear is rejected by its pack. When the mammals cited above coexist they also understand that as part of the pack, it is their obligation to participate of the hunting and that it will be their reward to share the catch.

On the other side of the room there’s Government, an entity that, in spite of having been created by humans and being composed by humans, has turned into a creature that violently enforces its own rules in detriment of its creators. This would be similar to the Lyon that instead of using its power to help the pack hunt more deer to keep the offspring well fed, unilaterally decided to savagely attack the other members of the pack, just because it had bigger, sharper teeth or an innate ability to jump higher or run faster than the rest of the Lyons.

While Natural Law always provided humanity with a clear understanding of what was necessary to be done to keep society functioning like a well-oiled machine, Government has turned into the rare, abnormal Lyon, bear or wolf that coercively enforces its will on its creators and which has learned that it also needs to reinforce the validity of rules and laws in order to keep people from questioning or trying to change its will. The scariest part is that Government — the people in control of it — has actually been successful at limiting and eliminating any sign of discrepancy.

The previous scenario begs the question: why did Natural Law worked so beautifully for humanity, but Government did not? I think the answer lies on the origin of each of the two forms of rule. While Natural Law is intrinsically, inherently attached to human nature, which made it very easy to  understand and apply in life, Government was a creation of perverted human minds that saw in its existence a great opportunity to stop being simply part of the pack, and become the head of the pack. How these minds became perverted is a subject for another article, but one only has to refer to ancient history to find very revealing traces of such perversion.

How we measure the moral side of Natural Law is sometimes a difficult task, especially for those of us who were born in the middle of a morality ridden society — which applies to most of us. However, it is safe to say that something which is moral is what our human nature suggests it is. Morality originates in human nature, therefore, humans will always be able to distinguish between what is moral and what is not, because that capacity to distinguish is ingrained in our very existence. Although some philosophical writer dwell into whether morality or the moral side of Natural Law is related to its legal sister — the theory of law within Natural Law — and that therefore something which is moral is somehow influenced by what is lawful, it is more logical to put morality before law, and to credit morality with the origin of law, both in Natural Law and Government.

Separately, the theory of law within Natural Law must be dependent on the moral theory of Natural Law. This is not like the game of the chicken and the egg, since what is moral comes and is born within human nature, what is lawful is, as a consequence, what is moral and not the other way around. Regardless of what is thought to have come first, the result does not change the way in which Natural Law helped and benefited humanity in the past. To say that some norms of Natural Law are authoritative is non-sense, because what is moral is naturally accepted as what is right and it is done voluntarily, and not in a way that is obligated by coercion or force. There is where it lies the merit of Natural Law. The legal validity of a decision made under the sponsorship of Natural Law or the authority it exercises over those who decide to apply it or those who decide to accept it is wrongfully assigned. Authority and Legal Validity are not aspects that came with or can be applied to Natural Law.

The daring task of trying to explain Natural Law through learned concepts is perhaps the origin of the corruption of societies and individuals that gave rise to Government. The attempt to define what in morality is lawful as some ancient thinkers and philosophers tried to do might have been where humanity deviated from its innate understanding of what was moral and what was not, as well as when imperfect explanations and assumptions gave way to immorality, which ultimately did away with Natural Law as a form of self rule. The search for collective [emphasis added] ways to explain what in origin was a concept meant and directed to the individual, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Humans began to see their natural system of law through the eyes of concepts and ideas that were neither natural nor moral, because they were tainted with the color of collectivist thinking. This collectivist view of life is what spurred the appearance of ideas that purposely or not, sought to create an entity that was entitled to oversee it all for the greater good. People, just like to Wolf, Bear or Lyon, lost sight of their own nature, the set of standards that served them for years and automatically discarded successful inherent ideals of self-rule, self-responsibility and respect for individual liberty.  Government did not appear when a group of individual decided that it was beneficial to give a minority the power to represent the majority and to decide for them, but when individuals erased their true nature from their physical bodies.

Different from Natural Law, Government is the rule of the minority over the majority, or the rule of the majority over the minority — this attribute depends upon the angle from where it is seen. The important point is that once Government, with its laws, rules and regulations became the authority, humans’ ability to self-rule and to be responsible for their lives was swept away. The new normal was then the application of collective laws, rules and regulations that did not have the best interest of the individual in mind, but the best interest of whoever managed to control the trusted servants through bribes, coercion or by injecting himself into Government. Where Natural Law served as a mechanism of self-rule based on moral notions that originated at creation — religious, random explosions or any other kind –, Government was created as a form of mob rule under which no one’s liberty is as important as the collective good. The problem with this concept — collective good — is that there is no such a thing as a Collectivity.

While Natural Law clearly defined what was moral and legal for the purposes maintaining individual liberty, Government could not provide a reference for the allocation of good for the abstract Collectivity. Since there those who believe that The Collectivity exists, and that is formed by individuals who become part of such a group, would it not make more sense to have a system of self-rule that empowered each and every one of those units that supposedly form The Collectivity, instead of taking away self-governance and self-responsibility from those units and giving it to an abstract concept? The lack of a cogent explanation for what The Collectivity is, makes it infinitely absurd to have changed individual liberty for whatever it is humans live under today.

Perhaps a more serious issue to be discussed in any conversation about the difference between Natural Law and Government, is that with the death of the former and the arrival of the latter, humanity also witnessed almost the complete disappearance of one of the two most important natural abilities that along with morality helped individuals rule themselves. That ability is free will. As much as philosophers, religious leaders, politicians or relatives desire to make people believe that they are free to choose, the truth is that our current idea of freedom of choice is as depleted as it has never been before. Free will is not the ability to choose between A and B or C. More importantly, free will ended precisely when and because of the creation of Government and the adoption of collectivist laws, rules and regulations. This is true unless one thinks that there must have been something that came before Natural Law, and it would be quite interesting to hear about it.

A not so neat feature of collectivist Government and laws is that by ending free will, it also erased self-responsibility from the equation. That is because the less free will one has, the less self-responsibility there is. That later translated into discounting responsibility towards others, because there was a Government that was put in place to take care of it. All in all, the disguised abolition of Natural Law and the installation of Government effectively ended the meaning of human nature. Humans don’t think anymore as free individuals who would naturally be free to choose and free to act, their minds have been tied with the tyranny of having to yield a big part of those freedoms to an entity that operates on behalf of the mob under the excuse that the common good outweighs everything else. Little do humans understand anymore that the idea of “humanity” that started it all signified the benefit of the individual that automatically translated into the so-called collective good.

The other natural ability is the capacity to reason. This ability has also been withdrawn from out minds through the traditional Government-enforced educational system, where children as young as 2 years old are indoctrinated into loving the Government as the provider of everything. From there, we’ve all been grown as vegetables in what is known as the self-survival process that Government uses to ensure its survival. Instead of being taught that we are capable of making our own decisions and that we are responsible for the results of those decisions, the Government system preaches and demands allegiance to itself. The non-compliance to its laws, rules and regulations immediately results in the imposition of penalties that usually begin with public ridicule and that go as far as being put in jail or worse, being executed.

How has the Government, which again was a creation of perverted minds, managed to outgrow Natural Law and individual liberty to a point it exterminated both of them? Its success originates in what some authors call The Horizontal Power of the State, a theory that describes how the tyranny of a Government is hidden in plain view as is maintained by humans who have succumbed to its system of slavery. This theory argues that Government appears to have a pyramidal structure, which the powerful at the top and the subjects at the bottom. Although this structure seems to be true, the real structure of Government is actually horizontal.  As mentioned before, Government is composed by the people that give it the legal and moral support to exist, and so those very same people are responsible for whatever Government does or does not do. Therefore, all things that originate from Government are a direct result of the support people provide to it.

Now, please try to explain the concept of Natural Law and how it serves free will, reason and individual freedom to a person born into the Government-managed system and you will have embarked in a mission that is almost always impossible to complete. That is because people who cannot think ultimately join the mob. For many of those people there is not turning back, and one must not waste time trying to demonstrate the bounties that Natural Law, free will and individual liberty, because they will never get even close to grasping it. It will be even more of a challenge to talk them into adopting self-rule, because they wouldn’t know how to do it. The lack of knowledge that does not allow humans to manage their own lives will also impede them from learning about and accepting self-responsibility. It is hard if one really think about it, since we’ve all been born into the controlled reality better known as modern society. How can anyone expect to teach the concepts of Natural Law, morality, self-rule and self-responsibility — ideas that were literally ripped off our human core – that for centuries have been absent from our daily lives in just a matter of one generation?

The process of re-educating the masses is a slow and painful one that must start with each of us first. The success of self-education will be the base for the real awakening that we hear a lot about on talk radio today. So, humans need to start learning how to govern themselves, how to assume responsibility for their own lives, how to live by set the of moral and legal standards incorporated in Natural Law, how to trust themselves when making a decision, instead of looking up to a degenerate creature called Government created by perverted minds whose only goal is to maintain and strengthen the wishes of mob rule.