Law, War, and Justice

Not long ago I heard a phrase that contained a stark truth, one of those truths that deserve reflection, and here is the motive for this article:

“Not everything legal is always right, and what is right is not always legal”

Let me clarify that I was not unaware of the reality and the implications laid bare by this trivial phrase; the assertion does not surprise me. Nevertheless, I find it useful for summarizing some conclusions I have arrived at over the course of my existence. Over time you observe that laws are nothing more than instruments the powerful have designed to harmonize their coexistence with those who wield less power. I think that most of the behaviors we consider “civilized” have their origin in primitive behaviors — those that belong more to the realm of instinct than to that of the rationality that supposedly characterizes us human beings. Taking the foregoing idea into account, laws may have arisen as a solution established by power in order to maintain its hegemony. Let us assume that primitive man (by this I mean above all man before the emergence of money) had three options for considering himself powerful: strength, intelligence, and the available natural resources; all or some of these characteristics granted him a certain advantage over others. However, how does one maintain that advantage over time? The answer is: “war.” War is the act that allows control of power to be maintained; armed conflict describes, at bottom, a struggle of powers. Before societies based on laws, codes, or norms became common, wars were repeated countless times — a phenomenon that also persists today, perhaps to a lesser degree. After wars comes peace, and it is there that pacts become necessary, preferably written ones, so that those who do not possess control of power must behave in accordance with the needs of the powerful. We often hear that: “laws are agreements or social pacts that everyone, or the majority, forms in order to coexist in harmony,” “law is order, the opposite is chaos”; but this may well be closer to utopia than to reality. Power configures systems that are continually oriented toward programming individuals to respect and obey the laws — laws that for the most part form part of no agreement or pact, because they were imposed on us in the first place; we were born with them. On the other hand, the supposed order that the law sells does not always represent a just order, but rather an order that benefits power and keeps the “powerless” individual at a disadvantage. The only way to evade the imposition and reverse the disadvantage is to enter into what I call: “the cycle of reform,” which consists of conflict–war–peace–conflict. Entering the cycle of reform requires that individuals organize into groups and that these surpass in strength, intelligence, and resources those who wield power — the characteristics we referred to a couple of paragraphs earlier. For this reason we can observe that the law represents order and peace for those who have won “the cycle of reform”: the victorious, those who have fought and conquered, those who have brought down the other — they are the only ones who can feel in harmony with the law. This reality shows that wars among human beings will be endless, because the law heightens the discontent of the disadvantaged groups, which motivates the conflict that leads to war, and finally peace arrives temporarily through the imposition of the winner's law, and thus the cycle repeats countless times. This brings us once again to the initial assertion: “not everything legal is always right, and what is right is not always legal.” The disadvantaged individual may take up a position that is correct without that position necessarily being legal, because the law is a tool that the power of the moment uses to control the other and thus maintain its supremacy. Power is exercised by people; people can be “good” or “bad” from our point of view, and consequently power can help you or trample you, create laws that benefit you, that benefit both parties, or that are unjust to you — and with this we verify the other side of the assertion: “not everything legal is always right.” © Alejandro Guipe | All Rights Reserved.