Constitutional Law
Part 2: “What Were They Thinking?”
Digression: “A History of Government in 6 Revolutions: From the Paleolithic to Philadelphia”
Pg 136. “The State’s Story”
PANEL 1
A line drawing reminiscent of the old “Ascent of Man” illustration. It depicts a crawling baby, a walking young girl, a running girl of 8 or 10, a preteen girl looking back at her younger selves as she walks forward, a teenage girl striding, a young mother happily lifting her infant, and an adult woman wearing a Corinthian helmet and carrying a spear and shield—The State.
The illustration has been marred by a bold red X painted over it with a large paintbrush.
NARRATION:
As you recall, there’s this tendency to think of the history of government as a progression. We frequently envision human societies as if they’re evolving through stages of development, from a tribal childhood towards an inevitable “state-level” maturity.
But that’s wrong.
It’s wrong to think of it as a kind of “progress.” And there’s nothing “inevitable” about any of it.
Bands, tribes, clans, states, what have you—none are “levels” or stages of development.
They’re alternatives…
Alternative forms of fully mature societies.
Whether the product of our genetic makeup or a cultural narrative, each alternative is a specific solution to a specific set of circumstances.
PANEL 2
The State stands in front of a stylized celadon illustration of Greek countryside, in the style of “Chinoiserie” on antique porcelain. She is addressing the reader.
NARRATION:
It’s true that narrative—story—is our superpower.
And yes, the narrative of the state gives us superhuman abilities—such as the ability to cooperate in societies of unlimited size, which can endure for countless lifetimes.
But for all that, the state is still just that:
A STORY.
THE STATE:
I mean, rocks and trees exist even if you do not.
But I only exist inside the goop in your head.
I’m a product of your collective imagination!
(Which is mind-blowing, but still…!)
NARRATION:
The state is one solution, to a particular set of problems.
What happens when it’s no longer a solution?
What happens when we stop believing the story?
What happens when we stop believing? At the minor end of the scale, anarchists, or perhaps ‘sovereign citizens’ with their own (wildly wrong) conflicting narratives. At the mid-point of the scale, insurrections. And at the far end, literal civil wars.
I’d put at the “minor end” minority group associated organized crime groups. The Irish Mob, the Italian Mafia, the various ethnic Gangs, the Mexican Cartels.
Groups that are made up of the disaffected, and hide among the disaffected.
I’d also list vigilantes and vigilanteeism, and all other forms of extra-judicial “justice”, in that range. Individuals and groups who, having become disillusioned in the system, decide to do “what is right”, in spite of the system.
So ISTR you had to give a sovcit in the comments the boot because he kept spouting off complete nonsense. But it seems that he was right that the state…doesn’t really exist. It’s just a narrative. Dare I say it, a fiction!
A fiction that’s very useful for organizing coercion against people who don’t want to pay taxes, obey the law, or otherwise participate in society.
Ah, our old friend Librarian. You know, to this day he is still the only person I’ve blocked from commenting here? And that was a hard decision to make at the time. Myths should be debunked, not silenced. And he actually generated some interesting discussions over the years. But instead of engaging with the material he kept spouting the same flat-out wrong nonsense, and it got to the point where he was gumming up legitimate discussions and wasting a lot of my time, and it looked like he was only going to get worse.
That said, how remarkable is it that he is the only person I’ve ever had to mod? All the other thousands and thousands of commenters here have been amazingly thoughtful, cordial, insightful, and fun. Nobody’s calling names or being rude or obnoxious. That’s exceedingly rare out here in the interwebz, and it’s one of the things I love most about this site.
THAT said, I don’t seem to recall Librarian making the point that the state is a narrative. I could be mistaken. But Sovereign Citizens like him don’t seem to fully grasp that our institutions—family, the state, the law, and so on—are all narratives commonly shared by a society. They don’t get that far in their thinking. Instead of story, they focus on words. Literally magic words. Say the right incantation in the right way, and the government loses its authority (or fails to acquire it, depending on your point of view). The right words in the right place make the difference between the “real” government and the “fake” one, or whether you have to pay taxes, whether the police can give you a summons, whether a court has jurisdiction over you, and so on and so on.
Of course, the law absolutely has magic words. The law is filled with litanies that, said with the correct words in the correct order at the correct time, create or modify or destroy rights, status, and powers. But those are specific rules working within, and subservient to, the much larger narrative of our legal system. Magic words aren’t going to alter the nature of that larger narrative itself. To change the nature of our legal system or the state, you’re going to have to get the rest of society to believe your different take on that narrative.
The irony is that Sovereign Citizens (and others of that ilk) desperately appeal to authority to prove that they aren’t subject to authority. They fail because they aren’t appealing to the narrative, or even trying to change it—they don’t even engage with it. They fail because they just keep insisting that the narrative is something completely different from what the rest of society understands. That’s a lot of what Librarian was doing here, and after a few years of it I’d had enough.
I think I recall him saying the state wasn’t real, but I could have mixed him up with someone else elsewhere. It’s been years and sovereign citizen arguments do kind of blur together.
And yeah, it is pretty awesome that we’ve got a place for thoughtful, civil discussion about the law. It can get pretty heated sometimes but that just shows how resilient our place is.
I found a comment once on this comic that said “You should [some kind of physical violence] for what you have done to this comic.” It looks like you moderated that one away as well as Librarian.
Huh! I have no memory of that one. Whoever it was didn’t get blocked, though.
Nope, the comment’s still there; my mistake. See here: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=449
What a strange comment. The person who submitted it was probably confused about where they were.
Is there symbolism behind the adolescent State holding a baby? Or is it just supposed to be cute?
It was supposed to show a young adult woman, in that progression from infancy to maturity. I couldn’t think of a clear way to visually distinguish an woman in, say, her 20s from a teenager. So I added the baby to help make that distinction. Guess it didn’t work.
To me, the State holding a baby looks 16, and the State with her spear and shield looks 25 or 30.
Remember the Statutory Rape bit back in Strict Liability?
https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1167
I’m not going to answer questions and I want a lawy…wait.
Remember the Church and State? I think we know who the father is.
https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2383
Ew.
In the next revolution we’ll see how the Christian Church was an, I don’t know, parthenogenetic? offshoot that budded off from the State. But as a different kind of organism. So them getting together wasn’t quite incest, more like what those ancient gods used to get up to. Only in real life.
But still. Ew.
No need to ew, it’s a cultural difference. It’s just different for gods (and Egyptians who have become divine, Persians who are emulating the divine, and so on) :)
aw
I am very curious to see what comes next. During my visit to Greece in 2001, I learned all about the “sea people” as the only theory available to explain the cause of the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, which otherwise was a mystery. But no one at that time ever framed the argument as a “From time to time, civilizations collapse because the ‘narrative’ of civilization dissolves.”
But the more this comic unfolds, the more anxious it makes me about what I’m witnessing every day with the loss of faith in social institutions that we as a country never before considered to be untrustworthy. This loss of faith in our government is frightening, as I’ve never before considered my government to be no different in its construct or fragility than my religion. Is our social narrative also about to collapse?
Back in late 2017 or early 2018 I wrote something (somewhere else) about a pattern I’d spotted in the run-ups to the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the U.S. Civil War. All three exhibited a pretty consistent series of attitude shifts, which deepened and worsened in identifiable stages, over a period of about ten years. At the time, it seemed to me that one could make a case that the U.S. was in one of the early stages, and if we stayed on track then 2025 would be a shitty year. But I wasn’t too worried. The early stages are a normal part of our rowdy political culture.
Now that 2025 is nearing, am I more worried? Nope. I do note that there has been a rise in people talking about a “coming civil war” since then, but they all strike me more as pearl-clutching and invective by extreme political opponents than as serious observation of general societal attitudes. There is certainly a deepening gulf between some divergent narratives of who we are and what we do, but that’s happened many times since the last Civil War and we managed to stick together. It takes more than that. A lot more.
There are important things to say about where these diverging attitudes come from, and why. That is one of the big reasons why I started this history of government in the first place. (Frankly, I thought I’d have finished it back in 2018. By 2025 I’d planned to be finished with Con Law and Torts Illustrated and more. But I’m having so much fun!)
One of those lessons, however, is that an entire civilization’s narrative can disappear and be replaced seemingly overnight, when people intuitively sense that it no longer fits their reality. A new one can sweep through whole populations like wildfire if it fits what everyone was already feeling. It’s one of our big survival skills—the flexibility of cultural narrative can adapt to new conditions so much faster than waiting for our DNA to catch up like every other species. (One of my little ironies is that even though cultural narratives bypass genetic evolution, they’re still a matter of survival of the fittest.) It gets sticky when institutions bog down and resist change, but nevertheless such overnight sea changes have happened many times throughout history. It happened quite suddenly in 1775, for example. You can see it in the rise of Islam. And when civil law replaced Germanic customary law. And…
Sorry, but I’m more of a pessimist than you about the future of our state. Particularly because I work in a school and am witnessing the diminishing quality of our human educational product that will eventually become the future of our nation. It’s not looking promising, I regret to say.
I’m trying to add a comment to page 559, and clicking on reply after entering my comment doesn’t do anything.
That’s weird. No idea why it’s not letting you.
What are you trying to post? Maybe I can move the comment there or something.
Now
“Federal Register, whereupon it takes effect. Not even people paid to read it bother to read the whole thing — it’s closing in on 100,000 pages of dense, often incomprehensible text”
I feel a lot of sympathy for the position of a character in Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” who says that if a state has a 2 chamber legislature, one chamber should be only charged with looking at existing laws to decide which ones need to be repealed
Done. I can’t for the life of me figure out why it wouldn’t let you do it.
Nathan, the “Latest Page” link on the main page links to a page that no longer exists (on the topic of that, why isn’t it visible anymore?)
Also, did you change some advertising settings recently? I’m getting a lot more ads that just say “Continue” without a brand name or product. Those are generally considered to be shady and only present in the shady parts of the internet.
The link to “April Fooling Around” in the “Odds and Ends” menu also links to the same missing page.
Thanks for letting me know. I must have clicked something somewhere, because for some reason the post was set to “private.” I didn’t even know that was something you could do (and what would be the point?). I’ve unclicked it.
As for the ads, they’re generated by Google, and they’re different for every reader. I myself use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, so normally I don’t even see ads, but when I turn them off to see what the site looks like, I also get really REALLY stupid ads. And totally irrelevant, to boot. Maybe Google’s algorithm is getting stupid?
I must say the ads aren’t really worth it. Most of my readers probably use ad blockers, too. Last month, for example, out of 186,886 genuine page views (excluding bots and worms and bad links and such), only 37,854 saw ads. This generated a whopping $7.71 in revenue from Google. 20 cents per thousand ad views is lame. I’ve tested out other ad providers, but they’re just as underwhelming, when they’re not wrecking the reading experience as well. Looking back, it seems that ad revenue fell dramatically during Covid, and never came back. I wonder if that’s just for me, or if it’s part of a larger trend.
But even were they worthwhile, if the Google ads are making the experience worse for people, I’d rather just get rid of them entirely.