Liberty or Justice for All

The point about the people – i.e. the victims and mourners -- I just described in the previous post is that they are – although they would be loath to acknowledge it – filled with rage. But this is not the hot-blooded rage of old – the kind that comes equipped with torches, pitchforks, and nooses. It is, rather, a helpless rage, and as such it is a symptom of our time. We have seen, over the past few decades, an ever-widening gulf between acts – i.e. those of the violent and/or insane – and the rightful consequences of those acts. And this, in turn, is based on what I will call the fragmentation of justice, and its bloating from an institution that served the people into one that the people serve, and before which they are expected to cower. It is said that “justice delayed is justice denied” -- but I will turn this around and say that it now applies primarily to the victims, and to those who care about them. Another expression – the one calling for “a prompt and speedy trial” -- describes something that is equally out of reach – again, not for the perpetrators but for the victims. (Ironically, military justice in this country is much more swift and sure than the civilian version – although it can be debated whether it gets any better results.) And the trial, should it ever come about, is, in the Kafkaesque sense, only the beginning. Final justice – conclusiveness – the “closure” that everyone seems to long for, has been rendered virtually unattainable. (This, of course, is why everyone is so obsessed with “closure” -- not because it can be readily obtained, but because it can't.) And this fragmentation is based, in turn, on the growing centralization and depersonalization of the justice system... on the triumph of bureaucracy and relativism over principle... and on the equivocation by which the perpetrator is, more often than not, considered to be every bit as much of a victim as the real victims. The minute a wrongdoer is apprehended, they are found to have undreamed-of “rights”. But do their victims also inherit a new, magical package of rights to balance things out? Well, no... theirs begin to erode at precisely the same instant. And not a day goes by but what, in some courtroom, the judge or jury is not asked to consider “extenuating circumstances”, and those are most commonly based (aside from the shopworn “insanity plea”) on things like “a history of abuse” (of the perpetrator by his or her parents, siblings, neighbors, teachers, parish priests and nuns... just about everyone who has crossed their path, in fact). Rebuttals of the sort that say, “Well, no one's childhood was perfect, but most people don't grow up to be murderers” -- these fall on deaf ears. The cult of the victim – i.e. the accused-as-victim -- has grown to such an extent that it could very readily be argued that all those in prison should be set free, and all those at liberty should be incarcerated. This is a symptom of moral, and even metaphysical, relativism that is all the more aggravated because the idea has been thoroughly adopted by the state and by its facilitators. And if one expects the issue to ever be debated in law schools, I'm afraid they've missed out on how the legal profession has “evolved” over the years.

So the rage in question – to which it would be most unseemly to admit – is helpless rage, and it never dawns on anyone experiencing it that the state, whose “blessings” most people, most of the time, rush to embrace (out of a baseline of helplessness and fear), has turned on the victims. The balance has shifted, in other words, and this shift has been caused by the very acts of violence that everyone deplores. Suddenly we are back to a pre-civilized state where the “biggest and baddest” rule the roost. It is, in a way, a re-assertion of the primitive, “red in tooth and claw” world that is supposed to have existed before the concept of “law” ever dawned. This is the paradoxical system we have come to live under, and it is a shock – though it shouldn't be – when the same premises, the same attitudes, the same “needs” that have fostered its growth turn around and show their dark side. At that point, there is no end of dismay – but the principles that animate the system have not changed; it's just that now the shoe is on the other foot. The state giveth, and the state taketh away – and in our time what it “giveth” is a false sense of security, and stability – and what it taketh away is any sense of justice, decency, and self respect. When we see the “perps” in the dock smirking and joking with their lawyers (think “O.J.”) we are only seeing the logical consequence of our willing giving over of our freedoms to a higher authority – and not just the traditional authority represented by the county sheriff but the distant, soulless authority of the leviathan state, whose ways are most assuredly not our ways, and for whom the individual barely exists at all. We help create a monster that is bigger than any of us – bigger than all of us combined – then wonder why it rages out of control. Because the state reaches the point, in its natural evolution, where morality and principle are no longer relevant – it is only process, and procedure, and self-perpetuation (AKA “jobs”).

Do I have to mention that the principle of distributism, if applied to the law, would have prevented this sorry turn of events? Do I have to mention that leaving the welfare of the citizenry up to a group of entrenched, power-hungry moral relativists and the secular humanist lobby in a distant capital has led, inevitably, to this turn of events? But as I said, none of this ever occurs to those who are caught up in, and ultimately crushed beneath, the machine. They are still looking, on some level, for what is wistfully called “frontier justice”, which was swift and sure, and which typically resulted in the order to “hang 'em high”. Crude, yes – primitive, even – but satisfying in a way that the system we have now can never be. (I doubt if anyone in frontier times ever wandered around looking for "closure".)

It also goes without saying that this cycle of helplessness and suppressed rage spirals ever downward, as layer upon layer of bureaucracy and “proceedings” are added to the already-towering monolith called “the legal system”. And like a whipped dog that keeps returning to an abusive master, people will look to the system for redress, even as they suspect it will only mean further victimization, further exploitation, and more profound helplessness. But isn't it true that helplessness is, in fact, the bread and butter of the system – that it's what keeps it going and sustains its power? And yet, like a disease that doesn't bother us as long as it's other people who are suffering from it, we don't see it going on all around us constantly. It only becomes “unfair” when our interests are at stake – but by then it's too late. And as the mystery deepens – as the outcomes of criminal proceedings become ever more incomprehensible – we fall into a kind of madness, in which we lose the concept of justice altogether and come to rely solely on the politicized, bureaucratized whims of the system. (And this, you'll notice, is the entirety of the law school curriculum; morality, ethics, and objectivity have nothing to do with it.) And yet we say to ourselves, well, at least it beats anarchy – but does it? There have been times and places, even in this country, when the law was virtually non-existent – but when people at least had the right to defend themselves – with deadly force if need be. (Even our inner cities can be cited as example – except that all the guns are in the wrong hands.) That was at least clear-cut and easy to understand, even if it lacked something in the way of civilization... of “law and order”. But our zeal for the “rule of law” -- which really means hiring someone else to control the behavior of other people (surely not us!) – has fed the growth of a system that is totalitarian but from which true justice is conspicuously absent. With each level “up”, the arbitrariness and politicization multiplies, until we all find ourselves to be strangers in a strange land – in a topsy-turvy world where the insane and the violent seem to have all the rights, and the rest of us have to live behind locked doors. And we see that, as far as justice is concerned, there is not the equivalent of economies of scale – that bigger does not mean better. The average citizen may understand local ordinances and most local laws... some state laws... but how many can relate to, or have any use for, federal law? And how many have any use for cases whose complexion changes as they are pursued up the ladder of courts and jurisdictions until the arguments, and the outcomes, are unrecognizable, except as tales told by a madman? And how many have any use for even lower, and local, courts whose deliberations have been tainted by the spirit of the times, and by the bad examples given them from higher up the scale? Even the most modest, inconsequential courtroom in the land can, in these times, produce outcomes that are astonishingly contrary to all common sense. Do judges all have to take a “crazy pill” before they are allowed on the bench? Sometimes it seems that way. So we are left at the mercy of the lawless much of the time – and in many cases they seem to be acting in tandem with the justice system itself. This is not corruption in the old fashioned sense, when money changed hands and justice could be bought. This is actually a worse problem – one that is moral and metaphysical. And where can we go for sanctuary? Back to those who have abused us in the past? But this is what they are counting on – that we have nowhere left to turn, so must, once again, submit ourselves to the machine.

This is the real source of much of the anger and helplessness we see so much of now – but again, there are so few who will see it that way... and those who do can be severely dealt with, so it's better to just stay out of sight. But – we tell ourselves – we are still “a free people”.