Vedic Apprehension Of Legal Plunder Part Three – Final Analysis

By Author: Premkumar a/l Nadarajan
Total Articles: 29
Comment this article

Partial plunder. This is the system that prevailed so long as the elective privilege was partial; a system that is resorted to, to avoid the invasion of socialism. Universal plunder. We have been threatened by this system when the elective privilege has become universal; the masses having conceived the idea of making law, on the principle of legislators who had preceded them. Absence of plunder. This is the principle of uprightness, peace, mandate, stability, mollification, and of good sense. And, in all earnestness, can anything more be required at the hands of the law? Can the law, whose necessary sanction is force, be reasonably employed upon anything beyond securing to everyone his right? It could be necessary to defy anyone to remove it from this circle without perverting it, and consequently turning force against right. And as this is the most fatal, the most illogical social perversion that can possibly be imagined, it must be admitted that the true solution, so much sought after, of the social problem, is contained in these simple words—law is systematized uprightness. Now it is important to remark, that to organize ...
... justice by law, that is to say by force, excludes the idea of organizing by law, or by force any manifestation whatever of human activity--labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts, or religion; for any one of these organizings would inevitably destroy the essential establishment. How, in fact, can we imagine force impinging upon the liberty of citizens without infringing upon justice, and so acting in contradiction of its proper aim? It is not considered enough that law should be just, it must be philanthropic. It is not sufficient that it should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive exercise of his faculties, applied to his physical, intellectual, and moral development; it is required to extend well-being, instruction, and morality, directly over the nation. This is the fascinating side of collectivism. But, again it is reiterated that these two missions of the law contradict each other. We have to choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free. And in fact it is impossible to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly conceive comradeship legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice legally trampled underfoot. Legal plunder has two roots: one of them, as we have already seen, is in human greed; the other is in misconstrued altruism. The explanation on the word plunder need to be relooked. One should not take it, as it often is taken, in an ambiguous, undefined, relative, or allegorical sense. It is to be used in its methodical acceptation, and as expressing the opposite idea to property. When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, one would state that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated. I say that this is exactly what the law ought to repress always and everywhere. If the law itself performs the action it ought to stifle, I say that plunder is still perpetrated, and even, in a social point of view, under aggravated circumstances. In this case, however, he who profits from the plunder is not responsible for it; it is the law, the lawgiver, society itself, and this is where the civic danger lies. Be that as it may, to conclude that legal plunder has one of its roots in misconceived philanthropy, is evidently to put intents out of the question. With this understanding, it is pertinent to examine the value, the origin, and the tendency of this popular aspiration, which pretends to realize the general good by general plunder. Law is force, and that consequently the domain of the law cannot properly extend beyond the domain of force. When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere repudiation. They only oblige him to refrain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right of all. They fulfill a mission whose harmlessness is evident, whose utility is palpable, and whose legitimacy is not to be disputed. But when the law, through the medium of its necessary agent--force--imposes a form of labor, a method or a subject of instruction, a creed, or a worship, it is no longer negative; it acts positively upon men. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own will, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiative. A form of labor imposed by force that is not a violation of liberty; a transmission of wealth imposed by force that is not a violation of property. If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you are bound to conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice. As the result of its systems and of its efforts, it would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all its self-complacency, can barely help perceiving the mammoth of legal plunder. It disguises it shrewdly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, unanimity, establishment, association. And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask it for justice, it alleges that we reject community, solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists. Whilst mankind tends to evil, they lean to good; whilst mankind is proceeding towards darkness, they are desiring to enlightenment; whilst mankind is drawn towards vice, they are attracted by virtue. And, this granted, they demand the assistance of force, by means of which they are to substitute their own tendencies for those of the human race. Mankind is merely inert matter, receiving life, organization, morality, and wealth from power; or, rather, and still worse—that mankind itself tends towards degradation, and is only arrested in its tendency by the mysterious hand of the legislator. Classical traditionalism shows us everywhere, behind passive society, a concealed power, under the names of Law, or Legislator (or, by a mode of expression which refers to some person or persons of undisputed weight and authority, but not named), which moves, animates, enriches, and rejuvenates mankind.

lecturer at a private learning institution ( UTAR).