Damn the Man, Save the Empire - A Tragedy of the Commons.

It has been said of journalists, but I think it more apt to say of lawyers that – the problem with lawyers is that they don’t read, can’t write and are unable to tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization. 

I ponder this thought as I am having to put up with being unsuccessfully sued by a creepy looking chick and a guy that looks like he could be his own grandfather. I write as I am waiting in court, listening to two barristers with pasty skin, looking exceptionally cheap in expensive suits, argue one way and the other for whether a bloke could get his driver’s licence. The person in question isn’t actually in court today, as is too often the case, but listening to various arguments he is described in simple facts.

He is in his early thirties, had lost his licence eight years ago after a string of driving offences and other crimes. Both barristers and the judge muse that these were “obviously” concerned with his involvement with drugs that was the cause, and all else was the effect. 

Does it strike you, dear reader, that when someone says “such and such is obviously...” what they really mean is “please don’t ask me to explain what I mean, cause I don’t understand it”?

But anyway, I digress. At the time that he lost his licence, the judge ordered that he never be able to get it back again. This decision was made because of his history, including the then latest event, which involved speeding away from police in a stolen car and colliding into another car causing serious injury to the lady driver. She had to spend seven days in hospital due to her injuries. 

In this situation, you immediately feel for the other driver don’t you? You put yourself in her shoes, in her car. She was probably on her way back from the chemist caring for a sick, orphaned child while knitting socks for lost puppies. When simple facts are presented, they result in simple truths, and the truth is never simple, only misunderstandings are. For all I know, she could have been a crack smoking kiddie fiddler on her way home from murdering a string quartet.

But she is the victim, so she is nice. 

The guy lost his licence as a result, apparently the law has the ability to permanently deny someone their driver’s license, but the law also provides for this permanent decision to be cancelled, thus making it kind of stupid to use words like permanent. But the law deals in absolutes and simple truths, which is why it uses these words and may be half the reason it is quite useless. 

In the eight years since losing his licence, our boy has been in and out of gaol and still might have a thing with drugs (apparently we can presume that fact because his affidavit doesn’t specifically say otherwise). In recent times, he may be turning things around: he is a bit older and wiser and has found employment that may lead to a plumbing apprentice providing he can get his driver’s license (thus the whole process began). His boss has also told the court that if he can’t get his license, there is little chance that he will be able to continue with his current work. 

Now we all feel for him don’t we? We think about the stupid and reckless things that we did when we were kids and think “well, that could have been me”. Surely he (I) deserve a second chance. 

This story takes a little over an hour for the court to deal with, mainly because there is so much speak of tiny little legal facts: standards of proof, standing of the people in the court, the actual name of the case - apparently the police don’t know their own name and filled in the initial form wrong which takes another five minutes to deal with.

The judge then, in a very long winded judgement, allows the bloke to get his licence back while making me cringe because he used the term “for all intensive purposes” (which we’ve discussed before haven’t we?). We always knew he would give the bloke his licence back, but just had to figure out the reasoning – the rules.  We knew because to say no would be unreasonable.

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

Now, the thought occurs to me that the guy was always going to get back his licence, the decision was made on grounds that in no way resemble what the rules are.  We like to pretend that we are above our base instincts, and the more removed from how we live, the more this is true. 

However research such as the Kill Whitey Project and the various Trolley dilemmas prove that our decision making faculties have little if anything to do with our reason. We are just monkeys with car keys. The less we have to provide for our own lives, the more we forget this and sitting here in the Supreme Court building, I am surrounded by people who are so greatly removed from having to look after their own lives.

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”

Things that allow us not to look after our own lives also seem to convince us that we are more developed. People who choose to cook their own food are seen as less evolved than people who pay for others to do it. The same can be said for most facets of life: growing or catching food, cleaning, gardening, building...

The best one we have come up with is rules. A series of rules allow us to think that we are making reasoned choices about things. We can give this guy his licence back because the rules allow us to. We are not deciding his fate, we are simply observing the rules.  If the rules apply to everyone, then they are apparently fair. Their true genius lies, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, in the fact that if there is a complete system of rules that could cover the events of life, they could never possibly be known by anyone. The list would be too long and contrary. 

That same contrary point can be seen in the current case: is it fair or just that the guy gets his licence back? That is really what is being asked here. It’s not a question of law, it is a question of opinion. Does his want to keep his job outweigh the want of safety on the roads or vengence of the prior events' victims? In our hearts, we think that eight years is long enough.

The contradiction in the answer is hidden by the rules. The rules say that this guy is capable of having a driver’s licence, but they hide the claim that a driver’s licence exists to stop people from driving away from police, in stolen cars and crash into our puppy-sock-knitting orphan nurse.  

The rules say that people can feel safe on the roads due to the rules allowing for it. There has to be a ‘defcon one’ for this to have any chance of working. If there is no absolute, then what is the point of having a driver’s licence system? Why don’t we just burn down the courthouses, kill all the lawyers, remove safety labels from everything and let nature take its course?

The answer- The rules don’t allow for people to be safe, or even feel safe. That's not the point. They allow for the state to own what was once owned by the people. If you need a licence to drive on a road, you have to respect the courts and the whole system. The state has purchased the roads and the very concept of travel from us. We now rent it back from them at a great cost. At one stage, roads and tracks were able to be trodden on freely. We built them, not the state. There was a time when we grew and caught our own food. Now we purchase it from people who don’t grow or catch it, but they have licences from the state to ensure that the food is not going to make us sick, or be misleading  or the like – the state, the law guarantees us this. 

The people that get sick or are mislead are seen as the exception to the norm, rather than the norm itself. It is never much considered that this is mere proof that the whole system doesn’t provide for us, it takes from us. The state gives out mining leases to large corporations so that they can dig a massive whole in our land and put up a big fence that says “get out and stay out” with more force than we currently advise refugees. I ponder if this is the same feeling Indigenous Australians had when white settlement first arrived. So many people were slaughtered mainly for killing a sheep or a cow that “didn’t belong to them”. Imagine being brought up in a tribe, catching or collecting your food, then these people come and tell you that they own that food. How can you own food you would ask? Those people must be crazy. Then those people have, somewhere along the way, convinced us that they do own the food, water, shelter and everything there is. If we would like to be, we cannot be and be free.

“Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”