Law and War I
In Developmental Delay and the State, I considered that the state is composed of two personality types, broadly speaking: developmentally delayed individuals (DDI) and mendacious individuals (MI). The DDI are psychologically manipulated by education, mass media, etc. into being “true believers” in the fictitious entity known as “the state.” In Edward Coke’s terminology, the state, as a corporation, or body politic, is “framed by the policy of man.” The MI are the “framers” of this “policy,” and the DDI are their suckers, dupes, marks or victims.
To analyze the MI, let us consider Antiphon the Sophist:
“the laws are imposed, whereas nature is necessary; and the laws are not born but agreed upon, whereas nature is not agreed upon but born.” (Antiphon, Fragments, F44(a). Pendrick, Gerard J. trans. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2002, p. 158)
Here, Antiphon distinguishes between two concepts: nomos, or law, and phusis, translated nature, but which might be translated as physics or even revealing, in the sense of its root. Basically, Antiphon is saying that the law of physics, or nature, is self-enforcing, but the law of the state is only enforced if certain conditions are met.
Here, again, we are met with the DDI person being unable to distinguish between a law of nature and a law of the state. After all, if you are arrested for jaywalking and given a ticket, is not the constable a man, and a "part of nature?” This, however is the same blindness as Aristotle mentions, and he quotes Antiphon in distinguishing Nature from Art:
“As an indication of this Antiphon points out that if you planted a bed and the rotting wood acquired the power of sending up a shoot, it would not be a bed that would come up, but wood-which shows that the arrangement in accordance with the rules of the art is merely an incidental attribute, whereas the real nature is the other, which, further, persists continuously through the process of making.” (Physics II.ii)
In terms of Antiphon’s fragment, Constables are agreed upon and not born. One is born a human. The DDI, however, do not recognize this distinction, and, as I said previously, they will tend to fall into thinking either everything is natural, or everything is artificial, instead of being able to make the correct distinctions. In the former case, they simply naturalize the state and its apparatus on the grounds that the state’s employees are themselves acting within a “physical” or “natural” world, and therefore indistinct from it, or into the “social construction” meme, which says that everything is made up, even science, mathematics, distinctions between right and wrong, etc.
In either case, they are manipulated by MI, who are aware of the distinction between nature and art (or nature and nomos, that is, “the policy of man”), who know that “art is framed,” if you will pardon the pun, but who manipulate the DDI for their own benefit. One of their excuses is that if physics is the only law, then there is no law against lying to DDI or manipulating them, or threatening them in order to order their destiny or labor.
In this sense, all law is “framed by the policy of man,” that is, there is no natural law in the sense of natural behavioral obligations. The MI personality would see Edward Coke’s distinction between persons natural and incorporate as a sort of manipulation of DDI individuals; in fact, there are no persons, except by assertion and enforcement, and even this does not really create persons in any thick ontological sense, it simply makes them a sort of rhetorical device in a system of impersonal forces, called nature. The MI personality, believing that by nature ther is no obligation to tell the truth, sees no bar to lying to the DDI about the state being a natural entity, or that certain artificial entities have some ontological priority, right to govern, legitimacy, etc.
This brings us, then, to how we describe such a situation. The MI individual, again, might assert that all descriptions are themselves agreements, but this seems a hard pill to swallow. Nature defines certain properties of objects: while it might be just or unjust to smash someone’s skull in, it is a fairly consistent activity, based on the natural material properties of the skull and the hammer that strikes it. The likely case is that, while we agree upon certain sounds to describe these natural events, like a skull being cracked, these events themselves are not created by agreement. Thus, we need a vocabulary that defines certain acts of the state’s employees, MI and DDI, withour reference to nomos, except insofar as nomos fixes certain phonemes, or sounds, for certain natural events.
“Cicero styled war a contention by force. But the practice has prevailed to indicate by that name, not an immediate action, but a state of affairs; so that war is the state of contending parties, considered as such. This definition, by its general extent, comprises those wars of every description, that will form the subject of the present treatise. Nor are single combats excluded from this definition.” (Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, A. C. Campbell, trans. M. WALTER DUNNE: New York, 1901. p. 17)
War is contention by force. Therefore, if we ignore the particular frame, or art project, that the MI/DDI statists use to explain or to justify their actions, we are left with, for example, when they contend that you must obey them, that they may force you to do what they say, this is a species of warfare. In a subsequent article, I will outline the different forms of warfare employed by MI/DDI statists: it is a lot more than being pushed around. Being pushed, or physically captured, is more or less their last line of action: prior to that they, rely far more on psychological manipulation, often enacted over a period of years, beginning with schooling, and, often times, threats directed at parents concerning birth registration.