The law is an ass?

Humanity has a strange relationship with laws. Being a basically chaotic species, it would be impossible to have stable societies unless we have laws that provide a modicum of predictability to the daily affairs of life. So, first, we strive to put in place laws and, then, bend every effort possible to cast off the restraints that the laws impose on us. When we are unable to do what we want to do, we scream that the law is an ass.

As, indeed, it can be at times. I mean, I am all for non-smokers having the right to not be endangered by secondary smoke, for example. What I cannot understand is how making very long train journeys totally non-smoking is a great help in that. A chap who can do without his tobacco for 40+ hours is a chap who can quit smoking, after all. So, the net result is that the law is broken, even by those who would like to be law-abiding, and non-smokers subjected to the hazards in all the toilets of such trains. One would have thought that setting aside a corner in the train for smoking would make more sense in ensuring adherence to the law - much like airports have seen the sense in providing a space to smoke in. But, no, the law has got to be asinine.

This strange relationship that society has with the law has its variants. As I saw when I shifted from Tamil Nadu to Delhi for work. Tamil Nadu, especially the TamBrahms, have this attitude that 'Anything that is not specifically permitted is prohibited' - or, they did in my times. And Delhi...Delhi is the prime example of 'Anything that is not specifically prohibited is permitted.' Which meant that an injunction to not pluck the flowers did not mean that they could not uproot the grass; an injunction to not walk on the grass meant that it was OK to turn cartwheels on it. No wonder that, when laws are made, they have so many sub-clauses trying to cover every single possibility of what exactly is prohibited. (AND still they miss. Like, you say that you cannot sell spectrum and make profits, and people sell a company for profit when the only asset in that company is spectrum)

The fact is that the bulk of humanity interprets laws somewhere between these two poles. Of whether what is specifically permitted alone is doable or whether what is not specifically prohibited is doable. In a sense, there are those whose morality limits itself to the letter of the law and those whose morality defines itself by adherence to the spirit of the law - and that morality itself being as strong or as weak as the desire for what is seen as prohibited.

Plus, of course, the risk of getting caught and the cost of getting caught. There are those who stick to the eleventh commandment for all their morality - 'Thou shalt not get caught'. There are those who weigh the consequences AFTER getting caught, in addition to the risk of getting caught. And, if the gains are high enough, the risk of getting caught low and the consequences are paltry, shall proceed to break the law with impunity.

The highest of the high operate in a plane of their own. They can close to eliminate the risk of getting caught and manipulate the costs of getting caught, so the laws that they don't break are the ones where the breaking yields no benefits.

And, yet, humanity will, in one voice, prayerfully seek the 'rule of the law' while bending effort to breaking any and every law that does not suit them. Except the vanishingly small minority of those who think 'Anything that is not specifically permitted is prohibited'. If, indeed, any such still exist!

When the humanity that seeks to make laws is asinine, the law HAS to be an ass!