The Law in the Box

Imagine a box:

Or a safe. Or a treasure chest. Whatever.

You do not have the combination or key to open it. You do not have the knowledge, contacts or skill to blow it up, or take it apart.

This box stays closed.

Inside the box, printed on a sheaf of paper, lined or unlined, embossed or unadorned according to your taste, you will find a commandment. A law. Well, you'd find it if you could open the box. Which you cannot.

This law may compel you to do something. It may forbid you from one or many behaviors. It may have fancy scroll work, and an excess of filigree serifs, fit for the court of a dandy prince, attendant at Versailles. It may instead possess the stark simplicity of a Calvinist injunction against dancing, written without flourish or the slightest indication that the author has ever known pleasure, to say nothing of joy.

It doesn't matter.

Because you cannot read the law. You do not know what its authors want. Hidden away in the box, the text illuminated by naught, and nothing, the law remains itself unknown.

So, trapped in this condition of perfect obscurity, what does the law actually do?

I submit: nothing.

The law has no power. Isolated in this box, unread - the law means nothing. It has no value unless human eyes read it.

And much, much more significantly - until human labor enforces it.

The law - any law, all laws - demonstrates the persistence of human belief in magic. Instead of seeing the labor, the belief, the hierarchies of control which actually constitute power and social relations, or the resources consumed and bargained in order to build up power - we see the law. The law obscures; words to mystify actions. As the cop's uniform covers his possession of weapons and the sanction of violence, or the priest's vestments hide his mastery of anxiety, fear and terror in the face of death and suffering- the law gives the wielder of it a mastery of misdirection. Like all practitioners of  magic, those who use the law use words to lie, to deceive, to confuse and obfuscate. They hold the law as a misdirection...

A man beats his wife. He slaps her upside the head, and terrorizes her into submission. Let's assume that the law permits his reprehensible conduct. By the fictions of grammar, his power over her receives the sanction of an actual belief in magic. He violates her very person, and words written down dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of miles away grant him the sanction of a word sorcery which allows him to do it again. Or simply to get away with it.

The law itself does nothing. It has no power. If we put it into a box and lose the key, no one can read it, to believe it, to use it as magic. But, as magic, it directs attention away from behavior, labor and action.

Believing it, those who might otherwise intervene on her behalf yield away their autonomy and self-direction.

Because even as fiction, even as word magic, even as an artifice imposed only on memory - it misdirects towards a very material reality. Power. By believing the law, by taking it out from the sealed box of ignorance and shining on to it the light of belief, a person or persons yield autonomy and choice to those who have and claim the power to enforce it...

Assume again - a man beats his wife, viciously or with the practiced hand of a calmly confidant perpetrator. This time the law forbids it. Nothing else has changed. Only now, his neighbors know that commands printed on a piece of paper authorize their effort. Now, believing the law, doing word magic in their heads, his neighbors intervene. They, with a firm faith in the sanction of words, give their labor; they restrain him, holding him until the uniforms arrive.

No other thing differs, but this magic done in the head.

This then, the law: the use of memory, often by repetition or visible enforcement, to program a person or people to believe that without sanction, or under the geas of  a compulsion, the capacity to act without permission does not exist, unless previously permitted.

Our work, as enemies of the law, and the power it conceals?

To produce and distribute as many boxes*, and types of boxes, in which to stash and hide away the words and magic of the law. And to disrupt, degrade or otherwise obstruct the repetition and enforcement of it, by any and all means necessary.

To encourage doubt in the efficacy of its enforcement by the intelligent, devious, sly, clever, mocking, irreverent, indirect and underhanded undermining of faith in the magic of words, as law, or the magic of sanction, as uniform, badge, title, accolade, position, rank or office.

Otherwise, we yield - and by doing so remove our labor from the factors the ruling factions must calculate and consider, giving them respite and reprieve when the deserve only opposition and disobedience...

* - so many options...

Added in edit and with all credit to dbzer0, because it seems relevant:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18777_5-scientific-reasons-people-who-run-things-will-always-suck.html