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An Anarchist Rants About Fairness

"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.

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