I'm not talking like the laws of physics, yes those exist in nature. I'm talking about manmade laws.
Laws are a social construct! They mean nothing unless someone enforces them!
In the book Lord of the Flies, when the kids are on a desert island with no adults, there's some inertia initially where they still behave as if adults are watching. Until it dawns on them that nobody is there to enforce the rules and they can do whatever the fuck they want, then there's chaos.
People still behave as if the law is just some natural force that exists regardless of enforcement. No matter how many times they see the law broken without consequences. No matter how many times cops ignore crimes or prosecutors drop cases they shouldn't or judges make a bad ruling, some people still have this blind faith that when something illegal happens, it will be punished. Or some even seem to think people in power physically can't break the law.
I had a fight with someone cause they were posting some shit about how ICE "can't" enter houses without a warrant and I replied with the meme about how robbers can't legally take your stuff without your consent. Sorry but ICE can and do do things the law says they "can't".
And sorry, but Trump can and probably will interfere with elections and stay in office for as long as he lives and invade other countries and commit full on genocide if nobody stops him.
And people act like it's an inevitability that Trump and the other fascists will face nuremberg trials. Sorry but it's not an inevitability. The nuremberg trials happened when other countries successfully invaded Germany and put an end to the regime. It's not going to happen automatically. It's only going to happen if there's revolution or war. Maybe a newly elected government will prosecute these clowns, but I doubt it.
The law is made up. It doesn't exist in nature. The only thing protecting your rights is a social contract. It is not inevitable that justice will be served. This isn't just in the Untied States. All over the world, laws are enforced inconsistently. Nothing guarantees the law will work as it is supposed to.
Laws are really just a social construct, but they are also a social agreement.
Cheaters always exist. It’s unfortunate their cheating will continue to destroy human existence. But that’s why we fight. For laws that we created as a social agreement to fight back against the cheaters.
Can’t be too cynical, not if you want to keep fighting
Laws suck at catching cheaters. That's why they are incomprehensibly complex now while cheaters still keep exploiting loopholes.
Practically no honest person obeys the law. They don't have time to consider all the legal intricacies, and even if they did people would rightfully call them assholes for following some legal duty to rat someone out for failing to do something unjust that is an unintended consequence of how multiple laws interact. Good people find just loopholes, break unjust laws where they can, and find social ways to hold harmful law-obeyers accountable. That's the anarchic reality known as "common decency".
Even the practical mechanism by which the current system tries to catch cheaters - by having a judge or jury of their peers judge whether they did anything wrong and treating that judgment as the truth for everyone to be enforced with cops and prisons - does not require laws.
Laws exist to project the opinions of a central authority without that central authority's need to understand the situation. They are a successor to people having to see the king to settle a dispute because a king who lets his subjects settle a dispute without him is barely a king at all.
Billions of people have existed without laws. If we want to stop living in a world where all law enforcement are bastards, we've got to get rid of the laws. Judgment on morality doesn't take fine print.