Outlawry

I've written one post previously elsewhere about the concept of outlawry. I don't think most people have any idea what that term actually meant historically.

I think most people think it means something like "The FBI's ten most wanted list." I think people think it means you are a bad dude who everyone hates and so we use this word as almost like a slur to say "you dirty rat."

That's not it at all.

Outlaw is a term that means "You are outside the law. The rules do NOT apply to you. So someone can kill you and not be charged with murder. Someone can rob you and we don't care. You don't want to play by the rules, cool. FINE. Then the rules of society no longer apply to you and that means the protections they typically provide to citizens are null and void."

We live in a world where very wealthy, privileged people expect the rules and system to protect their interests, often while making ZERO effort to actually abide by the rules themselves and I believe such people deserve to be declared outlaw.

Some very wealthy people want to agree very selectively with stuff, such as"power hath its privileges," and then demand privileges because they are RICH even if they get their wealth by criminal activity thinly disguised as legitimate business and not stewardship or actually adding value.

They operate on an assumption that simply HAVING money grants them RIGHTS poor people don't meaningfully have. That boils down to a system that says bad guys win and once you shaft someone, you have a RIGHT to continue shafting them because you did something that made you money and left them impoverished.

Historically, you needed something like twenty peasants for every individual doing anything else other than growing food full-time. So to have a king, a blacksmith or a doctor, you needed twenty peasants to feed each of them.

We don't understand that cost today. In the modern world, one American farmer with modern machinery feeds like 400 people or something silly like that. 

It was in my lifetime that the US became a predominantly urban country where most people live in cities. I mean like after I had kids, so within the lifetime of my children. So not that long ago, more than half of Americans lived and worked on farms, basically.

So historically in subsistence cultures the world over, you didn't really have criminals rotting in prison by the hundreds for decades. That wasn't really a thing.

Australia was a penal colony to say "Get the hell out of our country and go elsewhere and stop being a problem for us." And they didn't ship them to Australia and stick them in prisons where someone else had to feed them and clothe them. They dumped them there as colonists and don't fucking come back, asshole. Figure out how to eat. Not our problem anymore.

Historically, one way to be redeemed was when the latest war broke out, they offered people who were probably on death row or something like that the opportunity to join a suicide squad and storm the castle as the first wave where odds were extremely poor you would survive. And if you lived, they made you a landed noble.

So outlawry arose in an environment where they simply didn't have the resources to hunt you down and drag you into court and lock you up for years. If they got tired of your shit, they posted it publicly that you are outside the protections of the legal system.

You don't want to abide by the rules, then you no longer get to benefit from them. We aren't playing this game where we spend resources making your life nice while you play games with legal loopholes and telling us "prove it!" and hiring fancy pants lawyers.

Because all of the resources of the entire society like a functional banking system, functional monetary system, functional court system, functional stock exchange, functional markets cost everyone a great deal. And when one asshole doesn't want to respect the rules but continues to benefit from them, we are agreeing to let evil people win by agreeing that no matter how badly they behave and no matter how much they are gaming the system and everyone knows it, the protections of society are still granted to them and cannot be removed.

This is a system that defacto denies basic human rights to every single decent, law abiding citizen with morals and rewards people who break the rules and have no conscience whatsoever and for whom no amount of depravity is going too far in their eyes.

If you have outlawry as a legal tool, you no longer have a system that rewards evil because if you behave badly enough, the law abiding citizens can rob you, beat you or kill you legally. It's within the rules and they don't need to worry about being charged with a crime.

Planet Earth currently is extremely screwed up because we have a blanket assumption that legal protections always apply to everyone and can never be removed from anyone no matter how much they knowingly, willfully and intentionally break the rules and laugh in the faces of their victims which in some cases is essentially everyone else.

If you could outlaw a billionaire instead of fining him knowing he's going to laugh about the fines, billionaires who currently make no effort to abide by the rules would either suddenly behave or suddenly cease to be billionaires (and possibly cease to exist).

Because if you are declared outlaw and you are a billionaire, your wealth will probably magically disappear in under 24 hours. It would be a feeding frenzy.

And if you can't afford security and it's not illegal to off you, you may not live too much longer either.