One of the defining features of this age is the collapse in respect for the spirit of the laws through the reinterpretation of the letter of the law. In every aspect of life, clever schemers are either crafting documents that conceal their intent or they are reinterpreting commonly understood words and phrases so they can claim some new intent behind the words. This is driven not just by a disrespect for the intent behind the words, but a disregard for the very idea of rules.

The spirit of the law, of course, is the intent behind the rule, while the letter of the law is the almost always imperfect implementation of that motivating spirit. Originalism, for example, rests on the assumption that we can know the intent of the Framers when they wrote the Constitution, even if the result is not always clear. Debates over the Second Amendment are a good example. We know what the framers meant by “well-regulated militia” even if it is a vague term today.

Now, the Second Amendment issue is a good reminder that clever tricksters have always been trying to nibble away at the fabric of American society. Disrespect for the spirit of the law is not a new thing. Since the first written laws there have been people trying to twist the written words to get around the intent behind them. It is an argument against having a written constitution. It gives the tricksters an opportunity to play their word games on the trusting public.

The 2A topic, however, shows the limits of such games until recently. Despite their best efforts, the intent behind the Second Amendment has prevailed because the people and the bulk of the ruling class continued to respect the spirit of the law. Even something like abortion rights, which was invented by the court fifty years ago, tried to tie the new entitlement to the prevailing spirit behind the Constitution. Respect for the spirit of the laws is the cornerstone of a civilized society.

That respect has largely vanished over the last few decades. You can probably date it to when Bill Clinton famously tried to claim there was some ambiguity in the word “is” during his famous deposition over the intern business. A decade prior he would have been run out of town for such outlandish behavior, but in the new age where anything goes, the finest people cheered his willingness to find a loophole in the vocabulary in order to slither free of the net.

Of course, the arrival of these grifters from the Ozarks coincided with the arrival of the new managerial man. This is the highly credentialed expert with no practical knowledge, who slithered up the social system by making the right connections, belonging to the right groups, and flattering the right people. These are people who traffic is word play in a world where genuine accomplishment is a liability. Therefore, the better you are at escaping the restraints of the language, the higher you rise.

We have a practical example of this in Ukraine. The Russians have made clear that if NATO forces attack Russian forces from bases in NATO countries, the Russians are then free to attack those NATO bases. By all reasonable measures Russia could treat NATO as a belligerent just for supplying arms and intelligence to Ukraine, but they have drawn the line a bit further back. If NATO attacks Russian forces from NATO countries, then Russia will hit these bases.

This presents a problem for NATO, which would like to supply fighter jets to Ukraine, but Ukrainian pilots cannot fly the F-16 and Ukrainian airports cannot host of the planes, due to logistics and the threat of Russian missiles. That means the only way to put the F-16’s into service is to fly them with Western contractors out of NATO bases, but that runs into that Russian red line. So, the tricksters that now dominate the West have set to work on a workaround to this problem.

The solution is this. They will give the planes to Ukraine and then the Ukrainians will decide on their own to keep the planes at NATO bases. When they use these planes, the mercenaries wearing Ukraine patches will then fly the planes to a Ukraine base to be loaded with missiles, then take off from that Ukraine base to attack Russian forces with those missiles. You see, according to the letter of the law, this is not NATO attacking Russia with NATO weapons. It is Ukraine doing it!

Obviously, the Russians are not going to be tricked by such nonsense, but it reveals the thinking of the moral nullities who now dominate the West. Only people with no concept of right and wrong can think such a scheme is acceptable. These are people who always look for a way to slither around the rules by playing word games to evade the spirit behind the written rules. These are people who can talk themselves into anything because they are sure they can talk their way out of anything.

In a high trust society, there is less of a need for putting things in writing as the parties to an agreement come to that agreement trusting that the other party will respect the spirit of the agreement. A handshake agreement works when the men shaking hands trust one another to keep their word and they live in a society that respects the spirit of the law even when the letter of the law is confusing. In that society, writing things down serves only as a reminder to the honest.

In a world dominated by tricksters, who profit from finding ways around the words in order to undermine the sprit those words attempt to capture, the language becomes a weapon wielded by the guilty against the innocent. Notice that the lawfare campaigns all rest on the novel interpretation of the law, in direct contradiction to the spirit behind the laws, or the imaginative use of language to redefine common practices into violations of those newly reimagined laws.

This seems to be an end point of managerialism. In the accelerated lifecycle of fascism, they quickly arrived at a point where clever tricksters like Albert Speer were able to rise to senior positions. After the death of Stalin, the foxes came to dominate the party system to the point where even the people benefitting from it joked about the profound dishonesty of Soviet life. America seems to have arrived at a similar point, where only the naive are shocked by the rampant perfidy.

On the other hand, maybe all empires succumb to the liars who see empire as an opportunity to do their worst. A society held together by force, or the fear of the alternatives is not one that can respect the spirit of the law. As a result, empires may simply select for the sorts of people who eventually subvert the host. Maybe that is what we are seeing with the collapse of social trust. The empire of lies is the final stop for every empire on its way to the dustbin of history.

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