[From private correspondence]

On the question of “organisation” and “legal” law — which is always a thorny issue in Thelema — legal restrictions (e.g. on the dumping of waste, to continue this example), while apparently preserving the freedoms of others can actually have the reverse effect. In the above example, the scientist “responsibly” disposed of his waste as a matter of pure practical expediency, and the objecting community acted (or would act) purely as a matter of protecting their own freedom. Once you enshrine this in legal form, and start confusing expediency with “rights”, people tend to forget the wills of both themselves and others, and this idea of “right” leads precisely to the conflicts which it was intended to solve.

Thus, restriction begets restriction, and the “protection of rights” leads only to the emasculation of the entire population. It is true that without such legal protection, people may be restricted due to a lack of power, but it is a mistake to assume that the provision of such protection is without its own cost, which may in fact be greater. After all, such legal protection leads only to a different group of people being restricted by another group with power, only this time it is the interests of some abstract principle, instead of in the interests of actual individuals.

“I have no sympathy with any regulations which interfere with the natural activities of human beings. I believe that they aggravate whatever trouble they are intended to prevent; and they create the greatest plague of humanity, officialdom, and encourage underhand conduct on both sides, furtiveness and espionage. Any law which tends to destroy manly qualities is a bad law, however necessary it may seem on the surface…But I observe with regret that humanity is being compelled to turn its attention from its proper business by having to comply with innumerable petty formalities.” The Confessions of Aleister Crowley

For instance, if we were to pose a question such as “should it be illegal — i.e. a legal offence punishable by the state — for one individual to dump toxic waste on another individual’s property” we would receive a resounding “yes!” from almost everybody we ask. My point is that this unquestionable assumption that it is a good idea to have enforceable legal rights enshrined in statute is not justified. It may prevent some “injustices”, but the net effect of the arcane and complex web of restriction which inevitably develops from this beginning may have negative effects with outweigh this prevention. In particular, it may actually increase the frequency of such injustices, since instead of accepting responsiblity for their own actions from a practical point of view all ideas of “proper” (or “practical”) conduct are now delegated to the state or to the legal system, with the result that whatever personal motivation individuals may have had for regulating their own conduct is now gone.

“But nowadays, legislation has broken its banks. It has become a thing in itself and has arrogated to itself the right of revolutionizing the habits of the people in utter indifference to their wishes, but in accordance with abstract ideals which take no account of existing conditions. “Prohibition” is of course the most outrageous example of this inhuman tyranny. But all such aberrations from common sense defeat themselves in the long run. The law of Moses was entirely intelligible to the least of the Children of Israel; but today not even the greatest judges can pretend to know what the law is until the case at issue has been thrashed out and the decision established as a precedent. The most honest man cannot always be sure that he is not violating some statute. This is even more appallingly and Gilbertainly true in the United States, where federal laws, state laws, municipal laws and police regulations clash their contradictory complexities at ever turn. “Ignorance of the law excuses no man.” But it leads him to take his chance of peril which he cannot but ignore, and thus the law falls into disrespect and ultimately into desuetude.” The Confessions again.

To say that the dumping of toxic waste should not be a legal crime would elicit horror from almost everybody — my point is that the assumption that making it’s restriction legally enforceable may, for the above reasons, ultimately be counterproductive and lead to less freedom, not more. It may be that philosophically accepting a level of “unpunished transgressions” is objectively more productive than trying to make them all illegal. Ultimately, I’m saying that this uncritical approach of legally protecting “rights” may in fact reduce liberty in the vast majority of cases, rather than increase it which is the generally accepted presumption.

If we were to talk about creating a “Thelemic society”, an obvious objection would be that a significant removal of current legal restrictions would result in anarchy and oppression. I am proposing an alternative view that the present legal protection of rights actually does not protect those rights like people think they do — quite the opposite. In other words, people default to “we should outlaw such things” as an ideal, without stopping to think about what the objectively (so far as we can be objective, here) “best” way to act is.

Of course, even I cannot extend to agreeing that “any legal restriction on behavior is bad” — I’m quite happy to accept restrictions on, say, murder as being perfectly productive and justified, regardless of the fact that I cannot classify such an act as being objectively “wrong”.