Ratcheting Laws
A well-developed society with strong culture and conscious citizens doesn’t need that many laws or government regulations — even if the rule of law is fully enforced. The very same conscious citizens — and the companies and corporations built by them — don’t want to do dumb or evil things. You don’t have to force them. Their cultural code works better than laws.
And when there are fewer laws, you gain freedom — especially in all those cases where bending the rule is harmless. It’s just easier to live when you know you won’t be punished harshly for every tiny slip, or for something that wasn’t even your fault but the result of some random external circumstance.
This is deeply wired into us — like our sense of justice, which exists even in many animals. Everything living on Earth is family, just a matter of how distant. So what we call emotion has been whispering through nervous systems for hundreds of millions of years, carried by the same ancient molecules. Arthropods — who left our evolutionary family long before trees appeared — still respond to serotonin like we do. Even shrimp, small and alien as they seem, can be nudged by antidepressants into gentler moods, as if echoing our own chemistry across eons.
But the cultural level and self-awareness of people isn’t that high — especially in large societies. The range is just too wide. There are so many people that whatever seems acceptable to one group will be outrageous to another. Globalization and the internet have made every modern society more diverse — even small monocultural countries, let alone big multicultural ones.
So yes — laws are necessary, and changing life constantly demands new ones. The more diverse a society becomes, the more rules it will need. That’s normal.
The problem? New laws just keep piling up. And we have almost no real mechanism to remove the old ones. In most cases, this only gets reset by massive and — unfortunately — bloody disruptions: wars (especially lost or devastating ones), revolutions, disasters, or deep economic collapse.
So the best path forward is simple: Stop producing more laws unless absolutely necessary. And the best way to avoid new laws is to properly enforce the existing ones. In almost every case, there’s already a law to deal with the bad behavior — it’s just ignored.
Instead of writing a new law, stop ignoring the current one. Problem solved.
Take smoking in public places: a flood of new rules and bans, as if it had been perfectly fine before. No — it was banned for a long time. They just didn’t enforce it.
Same with illegal immigration — every country already has laws, and most of them have been there for decades. But the agencies that should enforce them don’t. Or look at Moscow: cars parked on sidewalks. It was never legal, but suddenly they passed several new regulations.
Lawmakers, instead of holding the executive branch accountable, just draft more laws. That’s actually a crisis of responsibility in executive power.
Tags: thoughts, regulations
