Initially this note was supposed to be about the laws of January 16, but then events began to develop very quickly, so we will talk about things that are more immutable and more important. About what laws are, why we obey or do not obey them, and where the real dividing line in Ukrainian society runs now. I will try to be as simple and concise as possible.
So, the word “law” as applied to society has three different meanings. The first is law in the same sense that exists in the natural sciences—that is, a “law of nature,” something that objectively exists and does not depend on our will. In the case of society, such laws also exist, only the methodology for knowing them is completely different, not like in the natural sciences.
These laws, just like the laws of physics, work objectively and everyone is advised to respect them for their own benefit. A simple example is property rights—the continuation of our “self.” This is a law of nature that cannot be undone, as our history clearly shows. Property cannot be “abolished”; it will always exist and will always be “private,” whatever it may be called. Comrade Stalin, for example, was known for his modesty in everyday life. He could afford modesty. He “had nothing,” but he didn’t need anything, since he owned an entire country.
The consequences of violating the objective laws of society are the same as, say, violating the laws of physics. The communists, with their attempts to “prohibit” private property, resemble people who ordered everyone under threat of death to drive on square wheels. The laws of physics are not abolished by square wheels in any way. At the same time, the laws of physics sternly punish those who drive on such wheels and generally hint that round ones are still better.
The second phenomenon that is also called “law” is the rules that form in society for the convenience and safety of our interaction with each other. Such laws are often called “customary law,” but traditions, moral obligations, and things that have no academic name also belong here. These laws, by their mechanism of emergence and operation, resemble the paths that form in a forest. They arise from people’s needs and disappear when they are no longer used.
Very often, in most cases, such “laws” are not even consciously recognized, and special efforts are needed to try to identify and describe them. But despite this, it is precisely these that we use most often in our lives. Let me give a simple example to clarify what I mean. I think everyone is familiar with the concept of a “well-broken-in” collective. This collective differs from a “poorly broken-in” collective primarily in that it has invisible rules that allow it to quickly and effectively achieve results—rules that were developed precisely during the time the collective was “breaking in.” Often these rules contradict official instructions and exist in order to cleverly circumvent them while still getting the job done as it should be done.
Well, now we have come to instructions and orders. These are laws in the third meaning of the word. This is what parliament adopts, and various decrees, orders, and other executive authority documents should also be included here, because their legal essence is one and the same—these are private opinions of certain people, adopted individually or as part of a collective and imposed on other people under threat of sanctions. This institution exists only because at some point some tribes conquered other tribes and, instead of slaughtering them, as was customary, began to impose tribute on them. This is, in a nutshell, the “military-tax” theory of the origin of the state. There simply are no other adequate theories. So, orders and decrees (primarily about tribute payments) are the direct ancestors of current “legislation.”
Now it is customary to believe that it is precisely this type of law that is capable of solving any problem and is extremely necessary for all of us. But laws of this kind are generally not what people need. For their purposes, society creates laws of the second type, “customary law.” And here the answer to the question “but why does everything work in the West?” immediately arises. It works, but not everything and not quite the way we think. The life of people “in the West” differs from ours in two aspects. It is determined to a much greater extent than ours by the laws of the second type, and the laws of the third type—that is, state orders—interfere in real life to a somewhat lesser extent and often simply describe what already exists. If, for example, parliament adopts a law establishing the value of acceleration due to gravity as 9.81 meters per second squared, to whose credit will it be that the “law is observed”? “Ours” differs from “theirs” in that in “their” case the laws approximate the truth, while in ours they depart from it wildly, and in wartime reach absurdity. It is in this sense that “their” laws are sometimes better than “ours,” but both are equally beside the point.
I want to emphasize that Western prosperity is caused not by the wisdom of their legislators, who supposedly understand the limits of their competence, but by the fact that society itself regulates a huge number of issues through explicit and implicit rules, “customary law,” countless civil society organizations, market economy and its institutions, and so on. The legislator simply has nowhere to impose his vision regarding the laws of physics, since people already know them in their most various spheres of activity. In fact, only the development of civil society can brake the growth of the state.
Now let’s look at what’s happening here. We live directly in a history textbook and in a dozen books on the theory of the state. Our state is that very same “original” state that lives by outright robbery and does not burden itself with any disguise. It took twenty years to reach this state, appropriating more and more power over people, and only now has society begun to resist timidly. Why did it succeed? The reason is the initial weakness of horizontal ties, of civil society. The state had somewhere to intrude with its false laws, something to seize, and the most terrible thing—people themselves wanted it. What to do in such a situation?
As a teenager, I often spent summers in Georgia “by the sea.” Even then, local life strongly surprised me—it was somehow very different from ours. Later, my father, recalling these trips, said: “There is no Soviet power in Georgia.” And some time later I understood what he meant. Georgians lived by “customary law.” They tried to resolve all possible issues themselves and related to Soviet power as to an external occupying force. Partially this power was integrated into Georgian society, but not the other way around. Together, without any conspiracy and in most cases unconsciously, they, in fact, squeezed the Soviet state out of their lives, since they did not need it. Another example, which I always give, is the system of blat—the shadow distribution of goods in the former USSR. This was a colossal mechanism that operated in parallel with the state, since not only condensed milk was distributed through blat, but also household and even party positions. And finally, the last, purely Ukrainian example—Easter. The communists organized subbotniks on Easter, but this did not stop Ukrainians. They came to the subbotnik, pulled out their eggs, and broke their fast. Communist party and Komsomol meetings did not help, often with “organizational conclusions”—people did as they considered necessary. And in the end, the Soviet Union fell. I saw this with my own eyes, participated in it, and will not tire of repeating—the Soviet Union fell because it became unnecessary to anyone. People simply left it, and they left because they had somewhere to go, they had customary law practices and dreams of a better future. More and more people at some point began to perceive the USSR as an external occupying force that could be dispensed with, and ultimately it disappeared.
We are experiencing a similar situation. Many call the authorities “occupying.” These people, for the most part, are flattering themselves. An occupying authority wants to be removed. Generally. In the simplest case—to defend oneself from it. But not to seize it, not to replace it with oneself. Ukrainians who brought pysanky to subbotniks did not set the goal of seizing the obkom to allow themselves Easter. They simply did as they considered necessary, ignoring all sorts of obkoms, and this was the only strategy that led them to victory, since the obkom is needed only to prohibit something.
Unfortunately, the majority still wants precisely to seize the obkom, to become the occupying authority itself, since there simply is no other option perceived. I think many have read “The Strategy of the Warm Ocean.” Regardless of the personality of its author, who directly before our eyes is turning from a hero into a “very suspicious person,” the idea itself is good, but it doesn’t work. Do you know why? It can work where there is a complete understanding of the external, occupying nature of power. If this understanding—whether rational or at the level of instincts—is absent, then a person, instead of overwhelming the system with requests, calling the housing office, the police ten times, visiting various kinds of bureaucratic mechanisms every hour, sings the anthem and chants “lea-der!” And he does this because power, for him, is not an external, foreign, and hostile force, but his own, native, and extremely necessary one. He himself wants to be an occupier.
Returning to our topic of laws, one can say that these people naively believe that laws of the third type—that is, private opinions imposed on others through force—are capable not only of replacing the self-organizing system of customary law, in which people voluntarily choose different methods of coordination, but also the objective laws of the first type.
Of course, I am exaggerating. Often the same person chants “lea-der!” and tells everyone that he needs neither authorities nor opposition. But, one way or another, it is along this line that the boundary of the real conflict in our country is forming today. This conflict already exists at the level of instinctive actions, at the level of attempts to make the Maidan non-partisan, at the level of rejection of status quo opposition, and so on. Essentially, this is a conflict between those who create and those who parasitize, or expect to parasitize, no matter in what beautiful and patriotic clothes this parasitism is dressed. Both groups are together now because they want to drive out “those.” But their paths diverge from there. Some need to put a new “leader” in charge, while others want this to never happen again. Never. The strategy of some is private opinions imposed on others through force (“laws”), the strategy of others is the restoration of horizontal ties and protection from an authority that is by definition hostile and occupying, whoever embodies it—up to its disappearance.