it is generally considered to be true that to have order you need rules and laws. In our culture someone who has no external moral compass is considered insane. I find this exceptionally strange and I wonder how this became the accepted truth we live by, particularly considering how much it doesn't work. There is no arguing with the advocates of our legal system. You can't tell them that it has done nothing to stop crimes from being comitted and even increasing. Every eyar we pass new laws in the vein of 'Though shalt not.." and we are shocked when they continue to be broken. We make things illegal that we know for a fact are things people do and have always done in our culture. You can't point out the causes: that our population is dense, that our resources are scarce, that we are not biologically designed for a community this large, that this lifestyle we are offered is fundamentally unfulfilling and has been for ten thosuand years (so much so that we believe outragous nonsense that festoons our culture with easy answers of escape from the suffering we manufacture). for my purposes today I am not even going to argue about all that. I am going to argue about the logic behind basing your society on prohibitions and punishments. Before I begin I am going to clarify: I am not now nor have I ever been an advocate of anrachy. I am well aware that anrachy is not a viable system of government so much as it is a transition between governments. I am not arguing anything remotely like anarchy here. Let's begin.

In the early 1900's the mathmatician Henri Poincare discovered that a rule based system is not an orderly system as we had always believed but a chaotic one inherintly. This was the begining of what you may all know as chaos theory. I am not going to give you a lesson in it here, you can do that yourselves I'm sure. The point is that we all know by now that rule based systems are not orderly, and yet we continue to labor udner the misconception that they bring order. Every individual knows that policies like zero tolerance are almost comical for the things they punish. We know it only makes sense to judge every situation by it's own factors. We've all seen or heard about the lives that are ruined by our justice sytem's lack of consideration. For example there is the case of Richard Paey of Florida who was given a 25 year drug trafficing sentance for obtaining legal pain medication he genuinely needed (he was later pardoned but my point stands). We should know better then this.

And yet we don't. We support a system that hurts the victim and thier family as much as the offender and thier family along with wasting the state's time and money for both trial and imprisonment and benefitting no one.

So what do I want? I supose I want small communities as you all know if you follow my blogs but I also want solutions that consider how to heal the damage, worked out by the victim, offender, and the families and communities of both alone. I won't get it, because the rule of law has to be maintained no matter how little sense it makes.

Doubtless some of you can drum up an example of how my idea would be worse. I'm not going to say it's perfect or that it isn't subject to tyrany of the majority, my point was one of the logic behind the idea of laws and nothing else. I included what I think would work better only so that I am not accused of advocating anarchy.