Digression 3 : Objective Rights and Subjective Laws
Ford and Stalin. How to Live in Humaneness · перевод (English) · раздел 13 из 42
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Digression 3 : Objective Rights and Subjective Laws
A right is an open opportunity of doing something while being safeguarded against a retribution for what has been done.
In the Russian world understanding the notions of «right» and «righteousness» are interconnected and the words that designate those notions are cognate. Therefore right is a reflection of objective righteousness predefined by God, so consequently a right is superior to a law passed by a government as a law can also represent an unrighteousness existing in the society. Only an ill-natured person can claim the words «right» and «law» to be synonymous. Such a person is seeking to make people confuse these two notions to the end of substituting rights with unrighteous laws.
It follows that if one accepts the terms of a theory where «Right» and «Law» are synonymous then one should distinguish between two categories of rights existing in social life:
· objective rights given to man and mankind from above. The main right superior to all other is the right of every man to act as God’s deputy on Earth guided by his conscience and in concord with the message of the Revelations [62];
· subjective «rights», established in social life by its participants themselves. They depend on their morals and are arbitrary, and can therefore be both righteous and unrighteous.
Consequently conflicts between objective and subjective rights may and do exist in the society. In following objective rights one acts in concord with God’s Will. Those who introduce, interpret and execute subjective «rights» attempt to impede the implementation of God’s Will by their arbitrary rules. In such a case Rights are superior to laws as reflected in an old Russian proverb: «The one who is righteous in the eyes of God cannot be accused by tsars». This philosophy is profoundly different from the canonical moral duplicity of the New Testament: «give to god what is god’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s». [63]
Besides any written law characteristic of the society in a specific period of history - if viewed in terms of the theory of control - falls into one of the three following information modules:
· algorithms [64] for normal control following a specific conception of social life and of life and activities of physical and juridical persons within this society;
· algorithms for defending control that follows this conception against attempts to exercise control within this society following other conceptions that are incompatible with the former one;
· algorithms to make up for the deficiencies that are inherent to the conception supported by the algorithms of normal control as such deficiencies give rise to social tension and conflicts.
But the problem of distinguishing between conceptions and the problem of how different conceptions manifest themselves in different fragments of one and the same legislation common for the state as a whole is beyond the majority of members of parliament, sociologists and average people. This results in the deficiency of legislative algorithms in most countries. Such deficiency is of a two-fold nature:
O in Russia there is no definite conception. It is therefore unclear what laws and their articles reflect normal control within the chosen conception and what parts of legislation are a means of defense against implementation of conceptions incompatible to the dominating one. These are the very reasons why current Russian legislation is contradictory, ambiguous and sometimes no less than absurd; [65]
O in Western countries there is a definite conception. Legislation is sophisticated in the part responsible for normal algorithms of control following the biblical doctrine (see Appendix) and in the part meant to mitigate deficiencies inherent to the biblical conception of society which is dominant in the West. Namely, it is the conception of a society financially strangled by Hebrew [66] corporate supranational usury.
Because there is a need to overcome and compensate for their own deficiencies Western legislation on business and financial activities resembles a labyrinth built in the like of «the tower of Babylon». One group of businessmen gets a right to hunt the income of other businessmen, employees and the state as a whole aided by lawyers and judges and prosecutors, without ever thinking about the consequences of the self-seeking approach encouraged among them as well as about who, when and by what means is going to disentangle all the complications. That is why Western legal practice is mostly shameless pettifogging to the end of «grubbing some money» on legal grounds or preventing others from snatching his or her own money. A horde of avaricious lawyers and «jurists» get their parasitic bread from this pettifoggery.
The second part of legislature that concerns defending control in compliance with the dominating conception against alternatives incompatible with it was introduced both in Russia and in the West in the period between 1917 and the 1950s when Stalin and his era were defamed in the USSR. After that the power passed into the hands of the new generation of Trotskyites, soulless bureaucrats and self-seeking career-makers. Under their rule the USSR lapsed into the period of «zastoi» (stagnation). The ideals of socialism were discredited in the opinion of Western intelligentsia, lost their popular support and no more threatened to eliminate the capitalism of Euro-American type.
In the USSR of Stalin’s times the notorious article 58 represented this part of legislature. It set a custodial punishment for various counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet activities. In the West the policy of defending normal control in compliance with the dominating conception against alternative conceptions was also present. The «witch hunt» in the USA in the age of «McCarthyism» [67] and «professional ban» for left-wing supporters in Germany in the 1970-s and early 1980-s could be named as examples of executing such a policy.
But if we speak about an era when the control of society along the biblical conception is being suppressed and a self-government acting to the benefit of God’s kingdom is introduced professional lawyers and especially legislators who never think about the conceptual background of legislation are the type producing the most detrimental effect. They are more detrimental than the more or less law-abiding businessmen (including usurious bankers and stock exchange speculators) who adapt to any legislation in force. A businessman (viewed as a class) will adapt to any legislation that from his point of view merely sets the «rules of the game». If the common «rules of the game» are altered most businessmen who are interested in nothing but their business and never think about global problems of sociology will adapt to them provided their life is not endangered and they are not threatened by expropriation («nationalization») of their property and enterprises. In our age a businessman does have a traditional unwritten right to forget about the conceptual background of legislation. Professional lawyers of our time have already forfeited such a right.