Society out of control

Control.

Control is the most important and determining factor of a civilized human being. Self-control is largely what separates the successful from the unsuccessful, the lawful from the unlawful, the moral from the immoral. The greatest advances of human history have been made in the form of control - of mastering the world around us. Our defining trait as animals is the ability to perceive the world as something greater than our basic senses dictate, to be able to form abstract ideas and put them into practice. We learn the rules of the world and then we use those rules to create things, from the simplest stone tools to glittering skyscrapers. Behind every development is the capacity to control it. It is inherent to every efficient tool to be readily controlled by the user.

When we don't have control, we have the wild world of chaos. Outside of the most fundamental and pervasive laws of physics it seems to be a place of madness. Your circumstances can change daily, your future is uncertain and potentially full of strife. There is a constant sense of fear with that unknown and untamed world. A fear of violence, a fear of hunger, a fear of the elements. All these natural and important fears that have dominated human history and whose reality have killed untold numbers of people. If you do not farm, you live at the whim of nature. If you do not raise livestock, you live at the rise and fall of local animal populations and their migration. If you do not control yourself you live at the mercy of your emotions and if you do not control others you live at risk of theirs.

As a society we have erected the rule of law as a monument to control greater than any one man or woman. The rule of law has bent kings to a knee before the people and made god a choice, not a necessity. The rule of law is what separates us from animals and from people who behave like animals. Law is control. Law is created around the rules of the world. For better or worse it is a force we are all subjected to, just as we are subjected to gravity, to heat, to light, and to all the other basics of the universe. Our rule of law grew out of common law, of basic uniformly understood principles that effect every human being. It grew and grew from a common spring in every human soul until it was bigger than kings and gods and nations.

To protestors who revel in their lawlessness

These people are nothing short of traitors to western civilization and the sanctity of the law. There is certainly room for the law to be improved. We can reign in the agents who work to undermine or twist it. We can root out the traitors in our midst who falsely use the law as a shield to fund personal ambition at the expense of the people. The law exists first and foremost to satisfy and protect the most basic needs of the people.

HOWEVER, changes to the law must be made within the framework of our democracy and constitution. When a person defies the apparatus we have created to protect and work out these ideals they reduce themselves to an unruly mob. They become closer to animals in their methods and tactics. By their own choosing they become something less than civilized. It applies to homeless people or drug addicts ignoring injunctions in public parks. It applies to the Kinder Morgan pipeline protestors in Burnaby. It applies to young people rampaging through Vancouver after a hockey game. Their defiance of the result of the law is immature, infantile, dangerous, and condemnable. Those who choose to throw tantrums when things aren't ruled in their favor, screaming and shouting, or blockading with their bodies, are like insolent children. These are the tactics of children who will thrash or pout and refuse to move and obey, who make a scene by needing to be dragged away by force.

We need better than you. You need to be better than you are in your conduct. There is no future for the civilized world that bows to the whims of fickle protest. We have mastered the plants and animals of the earth. We will master you as well. You will obey the law and work within it to change it for the better, or you will find yourself caged like a senseless animal.