A Guest Post by Lorna Campbell

WHAT is the law and what do we expect it to do? Most of us expect it to administer punishment for wrongdoing and, to an extent, deliver justice, but we also expect it to protect us by means of deterrence. What we do not expect in our democratic society is that it should give special treatment to any specific group(s) at the expense of another group(s) within society because that must lead, eventually, to an undermining of the very foundations of the legal system under which all civilized societies must live if they are to call themselves civilized at all. We all know that access to the law can be purchased by the rich, which is why crowd funders have sprung up in recent years to cover the costs of legal action by ordinary people who require legal services, and, by and large, many such cases have been successful.

Ancient societies

Ancient societies also had laws, and the very first ones were not codified, but principles, understood by all, that everyone should live under or the tribe would disintegrate under the pressure of lawlessness. In other words, individuals surrendered his/her ‘right’ to carry out punitive measures against another individual who had transgressed against him/her – called ‘vigilantism’ or ‘taking the law into one’s own hands’. It was understood by early societies that such behaviour could, and very likely would, lead to reprisals and feuds, down through the generations, vendettas, that would be never-ending and bloody.

A breakdown in law and order in a modern society can lead only to the disintegration of that society and predation on a massive scale by the strong against the weak: the most vulnerable members of society will become victims; and the most vulnerable in our society are women and children, the disabled/neurodiverse and the elderly; indeed, they will always be the most vulnerable in any society. Only the law, human decency or powerful male protectors stand between them and predation, injury and death – unless, of course, they take the law into their own hands and arm themselves against predators. Then, of course, you have civil war.

The word, ‘predator’ was used, originally, to mean a very serious threat to life in the natural world, but its meaning has been extended to mean all kinds of predation, from the sexual to the fraudulent and everything in between those two. No laws in existence can totally preclude and exclude predators. They can go some way to providing a deterrent to those who are able to use the faculty of reason and deduce that they are better staying within the law than risking placing themselves beyond it, because of the consequences that would flow from being caught beyond the law – the most harsh being imprisonment and loss of freedom, and a criminal record.

Law-abiding

All things being equal, most people fall into the category of being law-abiding citizens, whether through their own conscience and scruples or through the use of reason, until such times as being law-abiding is rendered pointless – in times of war and conflict, for example – when it may become a liability. Even then, many people will not stray, but those who do, with no constraints or restraints, become as dangerous as those who stray habitually. It is why we have laws that deal with military and war situations, and, often, where capital punishment is eschewed in times of normality, it may be deemed to be necessary in times of national crises, particularly war situations.

Recently, we have been witnessing a deterioration in legal strength in our society, where the law of the land is sidelined in favour of extra judicial and, often, illegal advice from lobby groups whose interests lie in undermining the law. They are constrained from achieving their objectives, that are not in the interests of universal harmony, and seek to have them replace essential legal precepts that have pertained for a very long time. Now, these objectives could be consistent with equality and fairness and equal representation under the law or they could be designed to undermine the very framework of the law and place them above and beyond it.

Bonhoeffer stupid

The very fundamental question has to be asked: why have so many outwardly intelligent people gone along with this objective of undermining the law, even of rising above the law? Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor who was murdered by the Nazis in what was a particularly brutal execution. He spoke and wrote of the kind of stupidity that refuses to listen to reason, that is self-satisfied and very dangerous because the stupid person, as opposed to the malicious one, will do terrible things to keep his or her beliefs intact and not to have to think deeply about them.

He studied human beings and discovered that very intelligent people can be incredibly stupid and that dull people can be very sharp. He realized that people can be made stupid and that this was a problem of a sociological nature more than a psychological one, although it is both. People actually become ‘infected’ with stupidity and the more sociable a person is, the more it ‘infects’, while people who are introverts and keep themselves to themselves are far less open to being ‘infected’. They are more likely to be of independent mind and question the new orthodoxy.

The ‘stupid’ person becomes ‘captured’, under a spell. For want of a better word, ‘evil’ becomes second nature, and the inability to see the ‘evil’ in oneself is very much part of the condition. Think of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s Year Zero, Stalin’s Gulag, Hitler’s death camps. The other thing that stands out about the ‘Bonhoeffer Stupid’ model is that it is mainly young people who are ‘infected’ first and most severely, although the ’Svengali’ figure(s) is/are always older and usually male with a penchant for control and power.

Infection

Bonhoeffer realized, too, that external liberation (physical) was necessary before complete internal liberation (of the mind) could take place. In other words, the edifice has to fall or this ‘infection’ will resist and go on and on, causing chaos and havoc, cruelty and suffering. Right now, we are in the midst of ‘Bonhoeffer Stupidity’ in relation to the law – both Scottish and UK law, not to mention, to a some extent, international law, which all appear to be unable to put the brakes on this ‘infection’ in the face of determined opposition to reason.

Our society is handicapped by the refusal of people in all walks of life, in public and private institutions and businesses, in politics and in the unions, to embrace any truth that attempts to reset their ‘Bonhoeffer stupidity’, and who absorb illegal nonsense rather than actual law, leading to all kinds of ridiculous and nonsensical outcomes. It is perfectly possible, and, indeed, probable, that undermining the law in one area will lead to undermining in every other area of law, so that nothing will remain to protect anyone – man, woman or child. After all, this is what happened in Germany, in Cambodia, in China, in the Soviet Union and a number of other places around the globe.

Clear intent

Our Scottish government does nothing, apparently, to ensure that all public institutions under its ultimate control, and including itself, obey the law, carry out impact assessments and do due diligence, defies logic, but that is the situation we find ourselves in today (recent Justice Committee hearing). Jurists in the past have always stressed that legislation should be clear and precise as to its intent, should use language that is understandable to everyone and is in common usage; and that it should be compliant with reality. Few, if any pieces of legislation passed by Holyrood in the last decade have met those criteria so that lawyers and judges are having to try and interpret as best they can. The law is not always scrupulously fair or neutral, and does not always deliver justice, but, without it, life becomes a game of survival of the fittest – or the most ruthless.

The dangers inherent in leaving the law to be undermined and misinterpreted, deliberately or otherwise, by elements within private businesses and public institutions, in relation to employees and as to how day-to-day duties are performed, leaves us all open to a lack of protection under the law. This dereliction of duty could and will lead to gross injustices and the erosion, and stripping away, of long-held democratic and legal privileges that, in turn, lead to the Gulag and to Auschwitz, to the killing fields of Cambodia and the destruction of the intelligentsia as in Maoist China. While we are speculating about an all-out nuclear war, the very foundations of our liberal (small ‘l’), conservative (small ‘c’) democracy, underpinned by the rule of law, are being eroded. Any war leads to a dilution of civil rights, albeit these can be restored after the war ends.

Doublespeak

An exaggeration? No. Not at all. We know, from history, exactly what happens when the law fails to protect the actual most vulnerable in society, when it panders to one or other group to the detriment of the society as a whole, when the judiciary becomes corrupted by Doublespeak and what can only be described as tactics aimed at intimidating and blackmailing the populace into compliance, and, subsequently, ignored by the forces of law and order. All it requires is en masse ‘Bonhoeffer stupid’ people and compliance by the establishment elites, seemingly unaware of the presence of, or unwilling to accept the presence of, extreme narcissism, psychopathy and sociopathy in the favoured group(s) and those conditions’ propensity for predatory behaviours of all kinds. When the democratic state itself is subverted, we all know how it ends.