Law and order are often grouped together in political theory. And for good reason: without the capacity to impose order, there is no capacity to impose law. The first laws were not created by common agreement among equals: they were imposed by kings such as Hammurabi, the Babylonian whose code of laws inspired all Western legal systems that followed.
Alternative centrist theory is no different in this regard. Without the ability to impose law, there can be no civilisation. The majesty of the Roman Empire was only possible on account of the excellence of its laws. The less gifted lawmakers appeared to the Romans as barbarians, and were subjugated accordingly. The best laws belong to the best societies.
If the position of the Establishment Right towards the law could be expressed in one phrase, it would be: ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you give people the excuse to ignore laws because they “didn’t know about them”, everyone would plead ignorance and the contrary would be unprovable.
The Alternative Centre agrees entirely. Everyone is responsible for making themselves aware of local laws. To not so do is deeply stupid.
The difference is, the Alternative Centre appreciates that not all laws are just. Humans write laws, and humans are imperfect, and therefore laws are imperfect. To the extent that they are imperfect, it’s not just to enforce them. This creates all kinds of moral dilemmas.
Back in the day, moral dilemmas about proportional punishment were easily resolved: most criminals were executed. Executing a criminal not only removes the possibility that they will commit further crimes, but it also removes all the subtler ways that criminals lower the standard of living of those around them. A study in the journal Evolutionary Psychology suggested that “by the late Middle Ages, [the courts] were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation.” Studies have found that the most criminal 1% of the population commits a majority of the violent crime, so this relatively small number of executions would have massively raised the quality of life for the other members of the community.
This worked fine as long as capital punishment was reserved for treason, murder, rape, armed robbery and a few other extreme offences. In medieval Britain, however, it became possible to get hanged for petty theft. This is clearly unreasonable.
The alternative centrist believes in freedom from unreasonable law.
Take the cannabis laws for instance. It has been until recently, and in many places still is, the case that people with medical conditions that could be treated with cannabis were expected to suffer instead of to use it. Here it’s easily possible to see the evils of excessive order.
It’s not realistic to expect people to obey the law when the law is clearly unjust, as per cannabis prohibition. In fact, eminent philosophers such as Henry Thoreau argued it’s a duty to obey unjust laws. Unjust laws are evil, and by defying them people can do good. The tension between order and freedom here is resolved with reference to one’s social class: the higher the class, the more one ought to err on the side of order. The law must serve justice in imposing order.
The Alternative Left is correct when they point out that many criminals have been influenced by poor upbringings. It’s a fact of developmental psychology that most children grow up thinking their parents are normal, and imitate them whatever they do. If the parents are antisocial, the children will become antisocial in imitation (unless they can reason themselves out of that at a later date).
Thus, crime is often truly not the fault of the criminal. Oftentimes they don’t know any better, because they have had selfish and infantile behaviours modelled to them by their parents, and this has taught them to see decent people as weak suckers. It’s cruel to expect people from environments like this to independently develop sophisticated moral reasoning. They have to be taught. If their home environment was too neglectful to teach moral reasoning, they need to be rehabilitated by the State. But if people are too damaged to be rehabilitated, they need to be executed.
Simply executing anyone who cannot be rehabilitated after their first violent crime is the essence of the alternative centrist approach to law and order. Modern psychological analysis is far more sophisticated than it was even 20 years ago. The violent psychopaths can be detected and eliminated.
The money imprisoning them can then be used on something else.
The alternative centre completely rejects the stupidity of prison abolition. The truth is that some people are evil, and these evil people see kindness as weakness. To treat evil people with kindness is to create more misery: as Adam Smith observed, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. Execute the career criminals and then mercy can be applied to those who made an uncharacteristic mistake.
Our news media is replete with stories of violent criminals getting out and then killing someone. At time of writing, a murder trial is taking place relating to an incident in my home town, in which the defendant already had a criminal record for violent crime. Had this criminal been executed for his first violent crime, the murder (of a policewoman on duty) would never have happened.
Aristotle argued that good laws prevent tyranny. In fact, he argued in Nicomachean Ethics that laws were the main way that morality was taught (parents don’t have the all-encompassing authority of the State). Bad laws, according to Aristotle, breed immorality, discord and eventually lead to revolution. Complementing him, Plato argued in Republic that bad laws lead to tyranny and then revolution. Good laws are therefore also the guarantors of order, peace and the other Acceptances. But these laws must be just.
Some people (usually on the Right) argue that the law must be used to fight against degeneracy. The Alternative Centrist disagrees: vice laws are the archetypal examples of excessive order. There is no need to fight degeneracy if regeneracy is adequately promoted. Therefore e.g. marriage laws ought to prioritise heterosexual couples. That does not mean to discriminate against homosexual ones, but to e.g. reserve housing grants for couples that can produce the next generation of the nation.
The solution to the moral dilemma of unjust laws is to disobey them, but to make a point of this being an exceptional practice. The more legitimacy the law has, the harsher it can be on actually evil people.
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This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.
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