[TeMPOraL]

> Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.

Good.

Let's keep in mind that the shared faith in this "holy religion, the rule of law" is the only thing holding together your country, my country, everyone's countries, and civilized society in general. Take that away, and everything around us will collapse, regressing the few survivors of that event to the prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give.

[kybernetyk]

I'm from Germany. I could tell you something about blindly following the "rule of law". If you throw morality out the window the law can become a very ugly instrument.

[omnibrain]

No, "Rule of Law" means "Rechtsstaatlichkeit". What you mean is "It's law, so it's always right" i.e. "Rechtspositivismus".

[kybernetyk]

Yes, Rechtsstaatlichkeit only means that the state and its organs have to follow the law themselves. It doesn't say anything about the moral quality of the laws.

The Nazi state had to follow its own laws. They just had such laws that enabled the total lunacy that the 3rd Reich was.

All I'm saying is: If you decouple laws from morality you get a really bad time.

[tfourb]

> The Nazi state had to follow its own laws. They just had such laws that enabled the total lunacy that the 3rd Reich was.

This is false. Even if you take the Nazi propaganda that their laws were themselves lawful (which they were not, beginning with the clearly unlawful capture of power) at face value, the Nazi regime did not adhere to its own laws and regulations. While in some cases the Nazi regime did codify a basis in law for their atrocities (i.e. excluding and expropriating jews), much of the Nazi terror both in a civil and military context would have been explicitly illegal under the law at the time.

This includes the November Progroms of 1938 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novemberpogrome_1938), large parts of the Nazi's approach to warfare, as well as the entire Holocaust (the murder of more than 6 million jews and other "undesirables"), for which the Nazis did not bother to create any legal justification.

While the Nazi regime was deeply bureaucratic (in that it documented its policies, orders and their results in high detail) this is not the same as "following the law". Most of the Nazi's atrocities evolved not through a process of lawmaking, but from their racist ideology and were given legitimacy through the highly personalized nature of the regime: Hitler was explicitly above the law, as were his orders, not matter if expressed through him personally or in his name by his followers.

[mcv]

Not sure why this comment got voted down; it's absolutely true.

The rule of law means that nobody is above the law, not even the Fuehrer or president. Clearly this is not the case in many countries, but it is in some, and it should be.

[felsokning]

> The rule of law means that nobody is above the law

If the stats from the Innocence Project are correct[1,2], then it would also mean that nobody is above being a victim of the rule of law, either.

The rule of law is not infallible - and any sort of blind "rule of law" worship is akin to the worship for a dictator; its just merely dressed in different clothing.

[1] - https://innocenceproject.org/exonerations-data/ [2] - https://falseconfessions.org/fact-sheet/

[cassepipe]

I went on r/AskHistorians and I found this answer which seems to agree with you :

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4h2rnc/comme...

[TeMPOraL]

Very insightful answer indeed. I found this part particularly interesting:

> One of the most interesting theories however is Ernst Fraenkels "The Dual State". Fraenkel asserts that Nazi Germany is a dual state where the normative state (the state based on the rule of law) coexists with the "prerogative state" (the state not bound by law). While some swaths of society such as the relation to private property, the civil law etc. continue to function on the basis of codified norms (think the building code, neighbor disputes, companies suing each other, "ordinary" criminal law, stuff in relation to ownership of private property), some parts of the state were unbound by the Nazis such as the prosecution of political opponents, the camp system etc. Fraenkel further asserts that once the prerogative state is established, it has a very strong tendency to expand into the territory of the normative state and that state actions once unbound will cause enormous havoc in a certain sense.

This theory kind of generalizes my statements upthread, expanding them to cover authoritarian states. Any kind of society we could label as authoritarian state is by definition already way too large to be fully micromanaged by the people at the top. Such a state has to retain a quite substantial "normative state", as Fraenkels calls it - and this state is what my arguments about intersubjective beliefs apply to. When people stop having faith in the "normative state" - whether because of "prerogative state" overreach or other forces - the whole thing collapses, and not even the strongest tyrant can hold it together.

[mk89]

The issue is that we're used to think in terms of Legislative, Judiciary and Executive. That's what most modern democracies are based on.

If you look at this the old way, Hitler wasn't above the law, he was the law, because there was no real split of powers.

Your comment, though, is very interesting because it defies the stupid idea that back then people respected laws, while today....

Somehow this got idolized, which is why (young!) people tend to feel nostalgic about such times. In reality, there was a lot of corruption, Hitler himself evaded taxes, used Party money to fund his own Mercedes etc.... yeah like today!!! :)

Edit: somehow this propaganda of people of law lasted until today. In reality, the guy was a fraud that collected millions over the years. While everyone else had to live in fear of deportations or worse. I don't understand why journalists don't focus on things like this to dismantle idiotic extreme parties.

[Ray20]

> Even if you take the Nazi propaganda that their laws were themselves lawful (which they were not, beginning with the clearly unlawful capture of power)

What definition of the laws lawfulness are you using? Capturing the power - it is what makes law lawful, otherwise any law is unlawful.

[tfourb]

This is a very crude and on every level incorrect understanding on how laws work, both in a formalistic, as well as a societal way.

When the Nazis captured power, they did so by excluding the legitimate (and lawful) parliamentary opposition from key votes in parliament by (unlawfully) imprisoning opposition parliamentarians. In a strictly legal sense, this made their entire regime illegitimate from the outset.

What you fail to grasp is that a regime like Hitler's is constitutionally and ideologically incapable of being "lawful", i.e. having any set of laws and norms that would apply consistently, even if these laws were shaped by their own ideology. The whole point of Hitler's leadership was that laws were irrelevant and completely subservient to facilitating his twisted idea of Arian racial domination, with even the "German" society being completely dominated by the "Ubermenschen" that he hoped to create out of the murderous struggle of war.

Even the ancient Romans and Greeks would have recognized the Nazi regime as "unlawful". While the roman empire was a dictatorial regime, it had a mostly consistent set of laws and norms that even the Cesar had to abide by (though these laws gave him tremendous power in comparison to modern democratic executives). "Personalized" regimes in contrast are not build on laws, but revolve around the whims and/or ideology "the leader". You can see some aspects of this in Trump's approach to governance, though the US is obviously still a long way away from the extremes that the Third Reich went to.

[ivan_gammel]

You are absolutely right saying that rule of law is not sufficient condition for the existence of modern society. It was a bit confusing still, because nobody claimed the opposite: the comment you replied to was saying rule of law is a necessity.

[rbanffy]

It's not sufficient, but it's still necessary.

[ivan_gammel]

Exactly what I was saying.

[lo_zamoyski]

Ah, but legal positivism is the norm in liberal societies, and not by accident. This follows directly from the demands of liberalism which privatizes discussion of the objective real and relegates it to individual sentiment. One of the paradoxes of liberalism is that the maximization of individual liberty necessarily demotes authority and elevates power, leading to tyranny.

So any appeals to the contrary are rooted in appeals to beliefs held in parallel with the liberal doctrines of the state. When Protestants ruled the US, that means some residual (often warped) Christian sensibility, because they were able to attain that consensus. But with greater competition today, that old consensus is no longer possible. Liberalism ensures that.

[vkou]

The Nazis did anything but blindly followed the rule of law. They did the opposite - they used law as a cudgel to beat their enemies with, while somehow magically, not being held responsible for any of their own violations of it. It's how they rose to power, and it's how they liquidated all of their internal opposition in the pre-war years.

We are seeing this play out again. The brownshirts have all been pardoned (with a clear message to the ones who will be involved in the next act - that as long as they break the law in support of the regime, they'll get bailed out), while everyone else is getting in line to kowtow and kiss the ring - because if they don't, they might be targeted.

It's actual insanity that people are looking at this and saying it is fine.

Then again, the whole country has gone insane, it looks at a video of the richest main in the world giving a fascist salute, and insist that he's just giving a confused wave, or that it's the same thing as a still of some other person with an outstretched arm.

[GTP]

But now, let's get back to the case in point. Who threw morality out of the window, Ross Ulbricht or the state?

[LadyCailin]

Both?

[orwin]

I thought everybody knew the first thing the Nazis did was eroding the rule of law, with the help of Hans Frank, before even taking power.

The fact that everybody is equal in front of justice and that justice should be independent, two of the basics tenet of the rule of law, were hated by the Nazis and called 'jewish law', and were targeted. Lawyers and judges were increasingly close to the Nazi party. The same crime by a party member didn't had the same consequence.

I think the Nazis pamphlet said that 'roman law follow the materialistic world order, and should be replaced by German law'. Where materialistic was a dogwhistle for Marxism, and world order for Judaism.

What did help Nazis was that older judges and lawyers were often aristocrats who didn't really love the republic, and new one were petty bourgeoisie where Nazism had a lot of supporters. They helped put a staunch conservative (who later joined the Nazis) at the head of the German supreme court before 1933. The man blocked socdems appointments, and changed how the German law was interpreted (basically pushing intent of the law vs letter of the law, where intent weirdly always aligned with Nazi ideology).

Then, once they had power, the first thing they did after the conservative Hindenburg (may he be remembered as Hitler first collaborator) declared a 'state of emergency was to suspend judiciary oversight over arrest and imprisonment.

[Gravityloss]

I learned so much from reading this, thank you. Is there more of this same style dense history writing somewhere? (Of course there are caveats and narratives etc., I hope people understand that...)

[Dracophoenix]

With respect to this particular topic, one may consider The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich by Ian Kershaw to be a worthwhile read.

[foobarian]

I found this short article also similarly illuminating: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/hitler-ger...

[Gravityloss]

I bought it as an audiobook and listened for about 30 minutes already. It's been fascinating. It is quite long. But I have definitely learned a lot. Thank you!

I guess the psychological aspect of clamoring for a strong leader would need more deep diving. Serhii Plokhy and Martti J Kari have talked about this in regards to Russia, those are available as Lex Fridman interview and youtube lecture: a strongman, even with downsides, is still preferrable to a weak leadership that is unable to defend against external threats or internal chaos.

The reader's pronounciation of German is quite incomprehensible though (book is in English). Völkischer Beobachter is not easy.

[orwin]

> a strongman, even with downsides, is still preferrable to a weak leadership that is unable to defend against external threats or internal chaos

What's interesting with that is that I think it is wrong, the part against 'external threats'. France during the revolution was attacked by everyone, and despite absolutely no leadership, managed to beat back, well, everyone. By deferring power, it made its army stronger. Yes, then some the people the republic deferred power to then took the rest of it by force, but the laws were weak and the culture not set yet.

[simonh]

Nobody here is advocating blindly following the rules. We can follow the rules with our eyes open, and while advocating for the rules being reformed.

In this case the person throwing morality out of the window was Ulbricht.

[sillyfluke]

Certain discourse in other languages sometimes like to underline the difference between "rules" and "law" as in "we must aspire to be a state built on law, not a state built on rules." (not necessarily claiming English is such a language either)

[ben_w]

Everything done without consideration is very quickly evil. Free tragedy of the commons with every free market; equivalents of Malthus for poverty wages and zero profit margins in the economy; Nash games where all parties want to defect and want the other not to; AI optimising for paperclips.

Rule of law is a pillar, but not the only one — in an ideal case the laws themselves are bound by constitutional requirements, and the constitutional requirements are bound by democratic will, and the democratic will by freedom of speech, and the freedom of speech by a requirement for at least attempting to be honest.

[andrepd]

Well you need to study history more x) If there's one thing Hitler did was precisely to ignore rule of law and rule by decree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Führerprinzip

[immibis]

In Germany it is currently illegal to criticise Israel. You'll pardon me for being a bit skeptical about rule of law. Rule of good law is good, but rule of bad law is bad.

[sources_please]

> In Germany it is currently illegal to criticise Israel.

Got any sources for this claim? Like an actual law?

[etc-hosts]

one of the German states foundations is responsibility for the Holocaust, which led to the founding of the state of Israel.

There are laws in Germany that make it a crime to condone a crime (forgive, overlook, allow, permit )

Some German courts have ruled that the slogan "between the river and the sea" is condoning the unlawful removal of Israelis or that the slogan is firmly attached to Terrorist Organization Hamas (therefore is by default a criminal statement )

Plenty of people have been fined for chanting the slogan at German protests against the current conduct of Israel in Gaza and West Bank.

There isn't a German law that states "it is illegal to criticize Israel" but laws like the following have been used to punish people criticizing Israel, in Germany:

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130.html

Some German courts have thrown out some of these cases, they don't agree the Condone Crime laws can be applied to chanting 'between the river and the sea'

[sources_please]

Thanks for the explanation.

I understand that you could face charges if you criticized a group of people and expressed something that can be interpreted as a call for their elimination.

Pretending that those charges are for the criticism doesn't seem right, though.

[JBSay]

Grossly excessive sentences for non-victim crimes while letting rapists, murderers and corrupt politicians go free with at best a slap on the wrist, is why people are abandon your "holy religion" in droves

[jollyllama]

Big shades of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas in GP comment

[TeMPOraL]

Never read it, but I watched its recent adaptation as a Strange New Worlds episode called Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach, and if it's in any way representative of the source material, then I'd say the ethical problems there are nontrivial.

[ETH_start]

Ironically, by sentencing him more harshly on the basis of ideology as opposed to on the basis of the criminal code, you are undermining the rule of law, which requires sentences to be based only on statutory law.

[littlestymaar]

It makes me very sad when people act as if the rule of law wasn't important, or worse in case like this they do as if the rule of law was only a limitation of freedom.

One cannot be more wrong: there cannot be freedom without the rule of law and without the existence of a state that enforces it.

[WinstonSmith84]

> ... the shared faith in this "holy religion, the rule of law" is the only thing holding together your country, my country ...

Let's forget a minute about that holy rule of law, "your" country has elected a convicted criminal, and it's yet to collapse.

[cbsmith]

> and it's yet to collapse

This will age well.

[mcv]

Yeah, it's pretty clear that the rule of law is not particularly strong in the US. The past few years have made it clear that some people really are above the law.

[JBSay]

Quite an interesting fact that both committed victimless crimes and both were victims of exceptional prosecution

[WinstonSmith84]

That's comparing apples and oranges. One spent 10 years in a jail for making himself rich (and some others), the other never spent a day in a jail for committing at the highest level election subversion, retention of classified information, hush money payment (and more) - and was caught on the latter, eventually. It was arguably "exceptional prosecution" for that hush payment, like Al Capone was caught on a mere tax fraud

[PinkSheep]

Maybe he should've pardoned himself into the past and a little bit into the future too, like that other man did. /jk

[itsoktocry]

>One spent 10 years in a jail for making himself rich (and some others), the other never spent a day in a jail for committing at the highest level election subversion, retention of classified information, hush money payment (and more) - and was caught on the latter, eventually.

What an interpretation!

Another one might be: they tried to throw all kinds of things at Trump, and they all failed because they simply aren't true, until they managed to catch him on some triviality.

The fact that you "rule of law" people keep putting out accusations as if they were convictions, and insinuating people should be judged on these accusations is truly horrible for the system.

[mcv]

Are you calling Trump's crimes "victimless"? And he's barely been prosecuted. Everything was postponed indefinitely or blocked by corrupt judges.

[jolmg]

> the rule of law" is the only thing holding together your country, my country, everyone's countries, and civilized society in general. Take that away, and everything around us will collapse, regressing the few survivors of that event to the prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other

I've seen this sentiment expressed before, including with the movie "The Purge" (that I admittedly haven't seen, but I understood the concept as law becomes suspended for a day and everyone becomes violent). That idea that the only thing keeping people safe is the rule of law seems absurd to me.

There's a sense of empathy, there's religion (e.g. desire of heaven and fear of hell), there are family values (keeping extended family ties together which can induce pressure to do what's considered right), a concern over reputation, a sense of unity with one's culture and wanting the betterment of one's people, collectivism (the psychological/social tendency to put others before oneself), stuff like not wanting to bring shame to one's parents and extended family, a hate for hypocrisy, a simple lack of any desire to be violent, etc. etc.

I like to believe that between most people and their potential for violence, there's a lot of things besides the rule of law. Law enforcement is for outliers that have a desire for violence and nothing else to stop them.

If law enforcement would disappear from one day to the next, people would be less safe, but I don't think to the point that you'd have "few survivors of that event", especially if you consider just a single country/culture going through that experiment, since this probably depends somewhat on culture and its particular values. I'm more inclined to think that life would mostly just go on as normal, carried by habit/convention and the values we instill in offspring.

[aaa_aaa]

Current state of your religion sucks big time then.

[butlike]

Maybe. Or maybe the arbitrary lines drawn and maintained that define "country" and "society" are the only things allowing hate to prosper. Get rid of the lines and become one people.

[mannerheim]

Selectively punishing someone with a grossly disproportionate sentence on the grounds of their political beliefs seems contrary to the rule of law.

[TeMPOraL]

He was punished for his visible actions, not his private beliefs.

Also, I was focusing less on Ulbricht, and more on what 'ty6853 wrote in the comment I replied to. Quoting another part of it:

> The state hates more than anything someone who operates on first principles that the empire is wrong.

My point is: the state is absolutely right to hate such people. This is true regardless of whether the "empire" is North Korea or the United Federation of Planets - it's not an ethics issue, it's a structural property of stable social organizations.

As for people living today, unless you really suffer under the yoke of an evil empire, it's worth remembering that, were the state to suddenly break down, things will get much, much worse for everyone in it, yourself included.

It's too easy for all of us to take our daily lives for granted.

[mannerheim]

Many were convicted of the same acts and received far lighter sentences. They specifically sought to make an example out of him. That is contrary to the rule of law.

[uludag]

I think you may be overstating this. The archeological evidence is pretty clear that prehistorical lifestyles weren't just small tribes slaughtering each other, and that there was a lot of variety and complexity in the way prehistoric societies organized themselves. Also, there are some societies that exist in 2025 which proved scary enough examples of what's possible.

There are also societies which have blatant arbitrary authoritarian rule which seem to be well in the 21st century. I doubt that faith in the rule of law is the only thing keeping our societies together.

[Ray20]

> pretty clear that prehistorical lifestyles weren't just small tribes slaughtering each other,

Well, that's sounds quite logical. When you kill people, they usually fight back. Very strongly fight back. So you have to expect something big to make it worth it. But small very undeveloped tribes had nothing of such, so they have no incentives to slaughter each other.

[TeMPOraL]

> But small very undeveloped tribes had nothing of such, so they have no incentives to slaughter each other.

With neither size nor technology to make a lasting impact, the ones that got slaughtered didn't exactly leave much in archeological evidence behind for us to find.

As for GP's point, obviously those people weren't bred for battle with others. All the tiny tribes would happily frolic in the forest or whatever small prehistoric tribes did when they weren't starving, but eventually they'd grow in size, hit a size limit leading to a new tribe splitting off, etc.; over time, the number of tribes grew to the point that they started to bump into each other and contest the same resources, leading to the obvious outcome.

[Ray20]

It was later, when humanity accumulate knowledge about resources gathering and processing, about nature and how to deal with it to not to die all the time. Then yeas, tribes were becoming larger, wealthier, more stationary. But before that there were very few people, the tribes were nomadic with virtually no alternatives and had nothing of value. At least nothing so valuable that it would be easier to get it by attacking another tribe, rather than by simply moving a couple of dozen kilometers away.

[uludag]

I'm genuinely convinced that prehistoric humans, being literally the same species as us, were just as capable as us in the ability to thoughtfully construct their societies. Like, why, when they bumped into each other, couldn't they have formed a confederation? I think instead of labeling them as children of nature or starving savages warring with everything in their vicinity, it makes most sense to see them as more or less similar to ourselves.

[TeMPOraL]

Editing in a TL;DR: imagine you and your friends are thrown back in time to year 20 000 BC or thereabout. Imagine you find the nearest tribe of humans, and by magical means are able to understand and speak their language. Imagine you go to their chief and propose to form a confederacy, and ponder what would stop them from replying "ugh" and bashing your head in with a club. Compare with a closest analog to today, and where the difference comes from.

--

> I'm genuinely convinced that prehistoric humans, being literally the same species as us, were just as capable as us in the ability to thoughtfully construct their societies.

I agree. We're basically the same people as we were before, hardware and firmware, +/- lactose intolerance and some extra mutations that, without modern medicine, would prohibit one from successfully reproducing. With that in mind...

> Like, why, when they bumped into each other, couldn't they have formed a confederation?

Because they most likely couldn't have even conceptualized this that long ago, much less make it work.

A "confederacy" isn't some built-in human feeling. It's advanced technology. Social technology, but technology nonetheless. In a way, it's merely a more advanced form of a bunch of elders getting together to deal with a problem affecting all of their tribes - but this is like saying passing around crude drawing on stones is basically a bit less advanced e-mail or international postal network. As an advanced social technology, a confederacy has a lot of prerequisites - including writing, deep specialization of labor (allowing for both rulers and thinkers to thrive), hierarchical governance, a set of traditions (religious or otherwise) that solidify the hierarchical governance structure and some early iteration of a justice system, literate ruling class, etc.; all of those are but a few nodes in the "tech tree" that leads to a confederacy, and more importantly, enables scaling the society up to the point we can even talk about a confederacy as we define the term today.

> I think instead of labeling them as children of nature or starving savages warring with everything in their vicinity, it makes most sense to see them as more or less similar to ourselves.

We still are children of nature. We're not starving because of all the advancement in science, technology and social technologies we've accumulated over the past couple millenia.

Consider that it is only recently - within the last 150 years - we finally stopped going to war over land and natural resources. Human nature didn't change in that time. What changed was that we've expanded to the point every place on Earth's surface has someone staking a claim to it, that the knowledge of these claims quickly becomes known to other groups; we then fought it out in 1914-1918 and then for the last time, in 1939-1945, then most countries accepted agreements to keep the borders as they are, and then we invented nuclear weapons and froze the borders via MAD.

The modern world is a beautiful but fragile place. If we let any of the supporting structures - whether social or technological or military - snap, the whole thing will collapse like a house of cards, and the few people that survive it will be back to prehistoric savagery. Not because they'd suddenly get dumber, but because they'd have lost all the social and technological structures that makes humanity what it is today, and they'd have to rebuild it from scratch, the hard way.

[throw7]

The law can't save us.

[potato3732842]

Look at every society before the modern state monopoly on violence. Basically none of them were in danger of regressing because of it. The evolution of the modern state is a result of inter society competition for who can apply the most massed violence against a competing state.

We've seen what happens when empires fall apart (Rome for example) and things don't revert to "prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give".

I'm not gonna go too far into this because like you say, it's a religion, and I'm not gonna waste my time trying to convert anyone.

[vladms]

Depends on the time scale. I mean the early middle ages (500 to 1000) could be described as "(smaller) tribes fighting over what is left" (considering all the barbarians from the north pillaging the roman empire while the Arabs conquering it from the south).

The evolution of modern society is as much a result of religion (centralizing a purpose and limiting inner fighting) of science (do things more efficient) as it is to violence.

Violence might be one way to progress, everybody is entitled to an opinion. I just hope you experienced it yourself if you believe it is the way you prefer personally. I am saying just because I thought some things would be great, only to be quite disappointed when I actually tried them...

[TeMPOraL]

> Look at every society before the modern state monopoly on violence. Basically none of them were in danger of regressing because of it.

They were too small. But they had their own social orders of equivalent importance, and breaking those would break them apart. There's a reason religion and tradition played bigger role in a distant past, and going against them was severely punished. It's not just out of spite or "us vs. them"; people take threats to stability of their group personally. It's definitely in part a survival mechanism.

> The evolution of the modern state is a result of inter society competition for who can apply the most massed violence against a competing state.

Yes. More specifically, it's the result of growth. It's the same thing as small tribes fighting each other over some small areas of land, except scaled up. Bigger groups have a competitive advantage over smaller groups, but there's a limit to the size of a group beyond which it ends up splitting apart; increasing that limit requires stacking more layers of hierarchy and associated social technologies. "Rule of law" and the legal system in general is one of such technologies, and it looks like it does today, at scales of groups we have today.

A group of dozens can just work on instinct alone. A group of hundreds requires some rules and specialization and designated authority. Scale that 100x, and you need another level of leadership hierarchy just to keep sub-group leaders coordinated and aligned. Scale that 100x further, and you kind of have to get something looking like a modern nation state, as anything else would either break apart or be defeated by another group that is more like a modern nation state.

See also: Dunbar's number.

> We've seen what happens when empires fall apart (Rome for example) and things don't revert to "prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give".

Europe would disagree.

[flerchin]

LOL I thought the time after the fall of the Roman empire were colloquially termed "The dark ages"

[kerkeslager]

Nonsense. "The rule of law" isn't one cohesive thing--sure, some parts of it are important for holding together a country/society, but in a sufficiently complex legal system (like the US') there exists a plethora of laws which are irrelevant to holding together society. Every such society has laws which are on the books but are not enforced, weakly enforced, or unevenly enforced. In fact, an implicit part of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's theory of government was explicitly having laws which only existed to be broken, to allow citizens to exercise their rebellious impulses without causing harm--Wilson believed that turning a blind eye to the breaking of a certain subset of laws actually minimized the harm of unlawful action. An example of this is rules against walking on the grass in many public areas in London, which is enforced by security guards whose only recourse is to tell you to stop.

The US also has laws which we don't care if you break, and the laws we place in this category say a lot about our society. For example, it's widely accepted that people can drive up to 10 MPH above the speed limit and consequences will be rare. Even more severe moving violations are met with a slap on the wrist which primarily effects the poor (fines).

Drug laws were already within this category before Ullbricht started the Silk Road. The was on drugs was explicitly started by Nixon as a war on the antiwar left and black people, and if you didn't fall into one of those categories, you were/are largely above drug laws, since enforcement generally targets those categories, while the social acceptability of popular drugs means that crimes of this nature are rarely reported.

Ullbricht's primary offense was breaking a law that was already broken ubiquitously. Society did not collapse before Ullbricht when these laws were broken, it did not collapse when Ullbricht broke them, and it does not collapse because of the myriad of darknet sites which immediately filled the void left by the Silk Road's closure. Ullbricht's arrest didn't end the blatant disregard for drug laws on the darknet, and yet somehow in the 11 years since his arrest, society still hasn't devolved into small tribes slaughtering each other.

In short, if people breaking drug laws was a real threat to society, then society would have devolved into tribes slaughtering each other already. We have had over 50 years of people ubiquitously breaking drug laws without societal collapse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

[TeMPOraL]

I'm not talking about any particular law, I'm talking about the general idea of laws as things that apply to everyone, that everyone should obey, and that everyone expects everyone else will obey, and that everyone knows they're expected by others to obey. That's the self-reinforcing structure of intersubjectivity, that allows us to invent and maintain imaginary entities such as "dollar", "law", "justice system", "contract", or "limited liability corporation", etc. Underlying all such entities is the set of shared beliefs about how others will behave.

This structure is self-reinforcing and very resilient: few people here and there rejecting faith in rule of law, or authority of the courts, or money, don't make a difference - we write such people off as weirdos and carry on with our days, secure in knowledge our world will continue to work as it worked the day before. But if sufficient amount of people have their faith falter, that's where the trouble starts.

For example, if enough people stop trusting in the justice system to deliver something resembling justice most of the time, you'll see people ignoring courts and laws and taking justice into their own hands[0]. People start lynching and killing each other, others see them getting away with it, which quickly destroys their trust in the system, and now you're at the precipice. If shooting a (person accused of being) thief is fine, if shooting a billionaire is fine, then why uphold a contract? Might as well get your own at gunpoint, etc. At this point everything stops working - banks, healthcare, fire services, stores. Your country collapses. You probably die.

That is why threats to our shared belief system are so dangerous, and need to be dealt with swiftly and aggressively. It's not about elites in power wanting to stay in power (though it's no doubt part of it for them) - it's because should we all start thinking our social structures don't work, and that everyone else thinks this too, and start acting on this expectation, they'll all collapse in an instant.

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[0] - No, whatever it is that America has with its police is still far from that point.

[kerkeslager]

> I'm not talking about any particular law, I'm talking about the general idea of laws as things that apply to everyone, that everyone should obey, and that everyone expects everyone else will obey, and that everyone knows they're expected by others to obey. That's the self-reinforcing structure of intersubjectivity, that allows us to invent and maintain imaginary entities such as "dollar", "law", "justice system", "contract", or "limited liability corporation", etc. Underlying all such entities is the set of shared beliefs about how others will behave.

You can talk about whatever you want, but you don't get to limit what other people talk about.

If you think there's anything like "everyone should obey, everyone expects everyone else will obey, and everyone knows they're expected by others to obey" around drug laws, you're living in a fantasy. You can talk about that concept if you want, but I'm saying that concept doesn't apply to drug law, which is, in case you noticed, the primary group of laws Ullbricht was convicted of breaking.

> For example, if enough people stop trusting in the justice system to deliver something resembling justice most of the time, you'll see people ignoring courts and laws and taking justice into their own hands[0]. People start lynching and killing each other, others see them getting away with it, which quickly destroys their trust in the system, and now you're at the precipice. If shooting a (person accused of being) thief is fine, if shooting a billionaire is fine, then why uphold a contract? Might as well get your own at gunpoint, etc. At this point everything stops working - banks, healthcare, fire services, stores. Your country collapses. You probably die.

You're picking unrelated examples and ignoring the issue at hand.

If selling drugs is fine, why uphold a contract? If driving faster than the speed limit is fine, why not get your own at gunpoint?

Sure, generally people agree murder is bad, but that's very little to do with the law or any sort of trust in the law. Your ivory-tower ideals have nothing to do with it: as it turns out, people don't want to be murdered, so we're all pretty happy when the cops enforce that law, whether we trust them or not.

I'll further add: banks, healthcare, fire services, stores, all only work for a segment of our population in the US. By your definition of collapse, large portions of the U.S. collapsed decades ago.

> That is why threats to our shared belief system are so dangerous, and need to be dealt with swiftly and aggressively. It's not about elites in power wanting to stay in power (though it's no doubt part of it for them) - it's because should we all start thinking our social structures don't work, and that everyone else thinks this too, and start acting on this expectation, they'll all collapse in an instant.

"Our shared belief system"?

Let's be clear, this is your belief system, and what you're trying to do is justify ramming it down other people's throats with the physical violence performed by police. Your belief system is probably the majority opinion within the upper-middle-class and richer demographic of Hacker News, and might even be the majority opinion nationally, but it's not unanimous or even close to unanimous. Drug use is well within the mainstream in 2025.