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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4920092" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's no accident that England developed a democratic outlook almost unique in the world.  England also beheaded one of its Kings, and you could do an interesting Ph.D. thesis on the culture that allowed England to govern itself in despite of its highly dysfunctional series of monarchies.Or not. Ok.  Feel free to demonstrate that.No, they are not.  Do you think that because there are a large number of laws that there is no difference between what I've described and the world of 1984 or Paranioa?  Paranioa, which is ruled capraciously by the whims an arbitrary and probably insane autocrat, doesn't even seem to particularly 'lawful' to me and seems rather to be a highly debased verson of what might have been years ago a lawful society.I won't quibble with that too much.  Exactly what are you arguing against exactly?  Because other than a blanket rejection, you haven't said much of anything that goes against my base line of argument.  To put it plainly out there where it can be knocked around if you want, it is this:1) A lawful good society has great respect for the law. 2) Equally, a lawful good society wants its members to prosper and be content.3) A lawful good society tries to pass laws that benefit its members.With me so far?  Let's shift gears a litle and present two more 'facts' which hopefully won't get alot of argument.4) There is an infinite (or nearly infinite) number of good ideas that one can have.  This follows from there being an infinite (or nearly infinite) number of situations one can be in, and a corresspondingly large number of solutions that may present themselves.5) Lawful people have no problem at all telling other people to do what is good for them.  They aren't 'live and let live' types on the whole, because they put the good of the group ahead of the freedom of the individual.  They believe intervention is more virtuous and demonstrative of love and goodness than toleration.  They aren't terribly concerned with personal freedom, and will tend to argue that freedom is illusionary at best and a decietful master (compared to say duty) that robs you of your happiness at worst.  They aren't above interfering in your life for your own good.From that it follows:6) It is very tempting for any society desiring to do good by its members, but particularly one with a high regard for the law, to want to enshrine every good idea in the form of a law so it will be there to benefit all.  That is to say, every time there is an accident, or a misfortune, or a catastrophe, or a need, or distress, or anything else, the instincts of the members of the society will be to say, "This could have been prevented if only X." and hense "X should be a law so that this does not happen again."  You see, what's most insidous about this is that lawful people tend not to believe in random chance.  They believe things happen for a reason.  Hense, they tend to believe that, if you had the right set of laws, that the world could be rightly ordered.  Now, this is in my opinion a mild form of insanity, but it tends to inflict alot of people in the real world including some very bright (maybe especially some very bright) people.7) At some point this drive to rightly order the world for the benefit of its members can go subtly wrong.  Oh sure, it can go horribly wrong too, but when it goes horribly wrong its generally not something we call 'good'.  Stories abound with sterotypes of LG societies going horribly wrong, to the point that I no longer even consider the idea interesting.  It can however go subtly wrong, and one of the ways it can go subtly wrong is simply forgetting (or never even considering) that a very very large number of laws - even if they are individually rather sound and well thought out laws - represents for mortals a very huge and onerous burden in and of itself.  Each individual law has a very good reason behind it.  Each individual law is intended to thwart a particular specific tragedy.  Each individual law arguably contributes to the well being of society.  However, collectively all these good laws end up constituting a prison.  However noble each law is separately, collectively they are just too much of a burden to bear.  They are, as someone so perfectly put, 'stiffling', in exactly the way that something good, when you have too much of it, becomes stiffling, choking, and even suffocating.  8) This becomes a very difficult trap to escape though.  Because, to repeal the law individually requires you to take on the reasonableness of the law head on.  Each law is in and of itself reasonable, and even if you managed to nitpick it to death, the likely result wouldn't be a repeal of the law (as you might have desired) but an ammendment of the law that made it that much more complicated to deal with the special cases you came up with.  Likewise, any attempt to repeal a bunch of laws together becomes an attack on the society as a whole.  So, it becomes very hard to repeal laws, but meanwhile a new law is created every time someone observes 'a good idea', some good that theoretically might be done if a regulation existed to prevent some evil or encourage some good.  In the right culture (and it doesn't even have to be a lawful one), the situation tends to just snowball until eventually society is buried under a mountain of well intentioned laws.This, sadly, is rapidly leaving the merely theoretical.</blockquote>

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