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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4920860" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ahh.. objections.  It warms my heart.The world contains a surprising number of idiots.  What is probably more surprising to most people is that it contains a very large number of highly intelligent idiots.  Actual idiots have this advantage over intelligent people: they believe that stupidity goes all the way to the top.  They do not believe it for the right reasons usually, often they are just engaging in a defensive mechanism to protect their feelings, but at least they believe it.Do we?  Do we really?  How many people think that the public school system does an adequate job teaching customs and ethics?  How many people hear would trust the public school system to even try?  I mean, seriously, what part of the world do you live in that is trying to teach some sort of ethical guidelines, because I gaurantee you its not part of the English speaking world.There is nothing new under the sun.  If anything, modern systems are much less likely to pass laws rashly and in response to panic because in a modern system you have to get many many more people on the panic bandwagon before you get an ill-thought out law.  Back when you had one man legislatures, I assure you, you got lots and lots of rash and over hastily implemented laws.  This opens up a can of worms that complicates things emmensely.  We'd first have to decide on a bunch of concrete facts about the nature of LG dieties, before we'd even begin to be able to deal with, "What if the government is literally a theocracy and not merely one in name only?"  Let's leave off that objection for now, and see if any of the rest hold before we try to deal with it.Doesn't really matter.  All I have to do is provide an example of a structure that would allow this to happen.  Even in modern states I think you'd be disappointed to find that 'anyone who feels like it' would have a very very hard time proposing a law and seeing it passed on any basis - popular or otherwise.  What matters isn't that everyone can, but that those with legislative authority do.  Even if only one person has legislative authority, so long as that person doesn't have perfect wisdom, then the situation described can develop.  And even then, we have to be very careful to define 'perfect wisdom'.  And, just as a preview of the problem of throwing a diety directly in the mix, we could presume a LG deity that had very great wisdom indeed, but whose personality and inclinations caused that diety to assume that any suffering brought about by incidental losses of freedom represented an inherent flaw in the governed rather than an inherent flaw in the law or system of governance. [quoteFourth. A lawful society doesn't need a law to cover every possibility. Because the people respond well to authority local control and regulation are very effective at controling problems without the long term restriction of law.</blockquote>Of course it doesn't.  But doesn't mean that a lawful society couldn't desire to have a law to cover every possibility.  A game system doesn't need a rule to cover every possibility, but that doesn't stop many people from acting like it should or from being tempted to try to do so.   And obviously, this is more likely to occur where the lawful population has been acustomed to 'Rule of Law' rather than 'Rule of Man' and is uncomfortable not knowing what the law might be.I've been speaking in the general case, but even the specific case doesn't I think preclude this sort of problem developing.  Even in D&D, LG dieties might feel that the right of self-government justly had to be respected and that a more hands off approach was required to ruling the living.  Or, a hands off approach might be imposed upon the diety by some convention amongst the gods the precluded intervention beyond a certain prescribed level.  We don't really know.  And, even if we did know, we'd then have to decide just how all-knowing, all-wise, and suited to ruling mortals such a diety would be.  There is no reason to assume that just because the WIS 30 greater diety does a bang-up job generally, that he does a perfect job, nor is there any reason to assume that flawed humans still wouldn't chafe under perfection.Doesn't really matter.  On one hand, you can ask, "Why would the Federal Government care about how deeply you plow your field and how often?" or any of the other things that governments meddle in with the best (or worst) of intentions.  On the other hand, the very same problems are likely to be manifest at every level of government if they have the same cultural root.  The central government might not regulate the dyers at all, and leave that up to the dyers guild.  But the dyers guild might, with the best of intentions, regulate its own affairs just as onerously as anyone.  Indeed, if you look at Athenian democracy, it didn't collapse because some tyrant subverted it - it collapsed because the voters saddled themselves with so many burdensome and stiffling regulations, that rule by a tyrant got to be more attractive than continued self-rule.  So really, this problem can develop quite independently of the sytem or structure of government.  People can have this sort of system imposed on them by a well meaning ruler wanting to order his people's lives, and people can literally do it to themselves trying to order their neighbors lives.[/QUOTE]

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