The Rule of Conscience

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The law is an ass.

Right now, the illegal administration in Washington, DC is busy removing what remains of the rule of law. The nominal president is shuttering or seizing control of many existing institutions because they tried (weakly) to hold the current president accountable for his crimes.

On the books, rape and felony are illegal. In practice, the law is rarely enforced against the powerful. That’s one reason we—The Saners—and other groups—including General Strike US (https://generalstrikeus.com)—are trying to remove tyrants.

And yet the rule of law doesn’t mean much. Laws can, and often are, stupid and cruel. Think of the Nuremberg Laws, the Jim Crow Laws, the Enabling Acts. Laws are simply rules adopted by a government. There is absolutely no moral qualification built into them.

The original American idea—one of the good ideas that still remains out of reach—is that people everywhere have inalienable rights which nobody, including no government has any right to violate. Our Declaration of Independence offered a short and vague list of rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That’s insufficient, but even those rights are routinely and often brutally violated by the United States government and governments around the world. These rights are also violated by giant corporations.

People of conscience anywhere on Earth feel they have no obligation to honor such laws. We are guided by a higher law: the law of conscience.

Now, you can dismiss this saying that conscience is simply a personal preference and has no moral basis whatsoever. And this can be the case.

But look inside yourself. Do YOU have a conscience? Do YOU know right from wrong?

So do we. So do most of us. So does every rogue who tries to conceal his immoral actions—because even he knows right from wrong.

Justice Potter Stewart Recognized But Couldn’t Define Pornography

Famously, in a case before the Supreme Court, Justice Potter Stewart admitted that he couldn’t define pornography—but insisted that he knew it when he saw it.

The same can be said about morality. We know that morality is set on a foundation of love, and we can tell when words and actions come from a place of love—or from a petty selfish place of hate, resentment, fear, vengeance or some other less than honorable motive. This is how a sensible person decides on what to do and what to avoid doing.

This is not based on laws. This is an internal human barometer. Right now, our moral sense is being challenged by tyrants and thugs in America and in many other countries. Fascism is on the march, committing atrocious acts and gushing a firehose of lies.

Rationalizations justifying tyranny and violence and greed, attempts to spread flowers over the stench of cruelty, of selfishness, of petty revenge, of outright stupidity—well, they are everywhere.
What is a person of conscience to do? What are millions, no billions of us worldwide, going to do about this?

Nonviolent Noncooperation

There are individual acts one can take. And, for greater effect, large numbers of people can work together, to weaken and topple tyranny. Better yet, we can make future tyranny nearly impossible.
The first thing to know is, we cannot topple tyranny by working within the rules (and laws) set by tyrants.

Those parameters will always favor the tyrant. We must play to our strengths and to our opponents’ weaknesses.

This is something that General Strike US is doing.

The most important truth to understand is this: nobody can control us if we refuse to be controlled. And yet we are controlled, or at least influenced enough for the effect to be the same as control. We go to work at least five days a week. We pay taxes. We vote. We discuss politics and economics mostly within the narrow parameters modeled by media, by political figures, and by “opinion leaders.”

We are astoundingly passive. Without this, there could be no tyrants because tyrants are simply individual people, with no more power than you have—except that other people, WE!, act on their commands.

The solution is simple but a bit tricky. Don’t act on behalf of tyrants. Don’t carry out immoral acts, or destructive acts. Don’t spread lies and hatred. Don’t even listen to tyrants and their “useful idiot” followers. And certainly don’t be one of their followers.

Except there is punishment for dissent. And your ability to get things you need to live—food, medicine and the like—is tied to obedience to whoever is “in power.”

It’s kind of a Catch 22. You can disempower tyrants except to do so, you’d need to defy them—and there are barriers to defiance.

So what now?

Overcome the Barriers By Working With Others

We produce everything. Tyrants and other “leaders” produce nothing. They simply make decrees, and get us to do everything for them, and to put their interests ahead of our own.

What if we stop producing for them, and instead produce for ourselves and each other? What if we the people decide to take care of we the people? Our neighbors, friends, relatives and affable strangers? What if we take care of the hungry, the homeless, the discarded, the forgotten?

What if we take care of each other with food and medicine and companionship and love? What if we left the tyrants to fend for themselves? What would tyrants do?

The answer, tyrants can’t do anything except order others to, oh, perhaps shoot at us. Except their enforcers are our friends and relatives and often ordinary people like ourselves. But by strengthening our relationships with “enforcers” in advance—NOW—we can make it impossible for a falling tyrant to reassert his power.

Let’s work together. Let’s do it now. Let’s start growing and sharing food. Let’s begin taking care of each other, talking to each other about what we are going to do. Let’s create alternative ways of getting what we need—and simultaneously begin withdrawing from working so hard to maintain the old, cruel, dying order.

We can do this. Tyrants have been toppled before—many many times. People can be smart and resourceful and imaginative and, well, brilliant. Let’s use our brilliance!

We don’t need to fight the power. We ARE the power. What we need to do is redirect our power. This won’t happen overnight. It will necessarily take place in stages. For example, we won’t stop producing all food ordered by our overseers. We can start with, for example, junk food. And phase out other foods produced “conventionally” as our own alternative sources of food expand.

This is challenging but the biggest challenge is psychological. We like to quietly go along. That feels easy. That’s the path of least resistance. To defy the normal common way, even when the normal common ways are tragically insane, requires moving outside of our comfort zone.

But frankly, where we are today, the so-called “comfort zone” has become pretty damn uncomfortable, and it’s becoming increasingly horrible every day.

So, yeah, it’s uncomfortable, but we need to just do it. Talk to friends, family, members of your community. Strengthen relationships and begin to consciously help one another. Begin creating alternative sources for necessities, like food. Do container gardening of food in your backyard, on your roof. We should all have mini farms instead of lawns.

Get in the habit of talking to enforcers, local police, and other armed members of government agencies. Start with the smallest of small talk—the weather. Then move on to sports, families, pets. We should be real people to them, people that they talk with and like. And they shouldn’t be armed goons to us—they should be pleasant acquaintances, people who we enjoy seeing.

The more we humanize people—ALL people—the stronger we are and the weaker the rulers become.

This is the way forward. This is possible. This is revolutionary. All we need to do is commit ourselves to the plan. To start now. And to never stop until complete and total victory.

If you haven’t done so, please sign up for The Saners right now at WeAreSaners.org/join.