Chivalry was always dead. A note on law.

Introduction : Chivalry code and white washing history

I don’t know how I ended up here. I was reading about Schizophrenia and ended up thinking about delusions and Don Quixote. Asking ChatGPT about him and coming accross the knight-errant concept popular in some chivalry / adventure literature in that time and asked ChatGPT right out the bat: Is the concept of chivalry not a cheap PR attempt at white washing the realities of people on horsebacks slaying peasents. And ChatGPT delivered: Chivalry codes were aimed at the warrior classes of the medi-evil times to instill certain types of behaviours.

Not only did this link in my brain to the Samurai code, which now I wondered, was likely whitewashing the Samuarai reality as well. But it also linked to the Legalist tradition in China where the law was a method of ruling. But it also linked to my understanding of old Ancient western codes of law where you find very odd regulations which told me one thing: if it is in law, it happened quite often. Why else would someone put the rules about women being taken to the forest into a legal code?

So this is about law. And how law works in the context of white washing reality.

Covering some basics

So in theory, if you think about corporate policies or contracts you find in common life, legal texts contain things that are nonsese. They are not enforcable and sometimes not permissible and even illegal. This is why they always carry salvatoric clauses. But they still exist.

Law is fraudulent

So the first thing we have to understand is that law is inherently fraudulend. If you invent a false set of facts to gain an advantage of someone, it is called fraud. So if you claim that you sell a 1000 dollar shirt of Dolce Gabana, which actually is only worth 100 dollar and is fake, and the other ones is gullible enough to buy the 1000 dollar one, you may be committing fraud. A criminal offense.

But if you encode into a contract a non-permissible clause that threatens or intimidates or defraud — by claiming something to be legally enforcable which is not, then you are very unlikely to be hit with a fraud charge. But the other party has the right and obligation to either strike through the clause — in whcih case you would not sign the contract — or battle it later when necessary. Which feeds the money pot of the lawyers and is their way of defrauding you. Let’s say your employer tells you that you are not allowed to work on a side hustle, because XXX. That is simply not true, he has not right to tell you what you can do outside of your work. By merely stating this, they commit fraud. But since it is your autonomy to strike the clause or be informed that it is not permissible, you can usually not sue them for fraud. But you could battle the consequences of being fired for not telling you about your second Job in court. So the law works a bit different. By just writing this clause even if it may not hold in court, it shifts more motivation and dependency and submission to the employer, and makes the employee more desperate, less independent and forces him to forgoe other source of income. So it is a fiction — or a statement of facts — that indeed defrauds you. But it is not fraud, because you both are grown ups and agree.

Law is a maze

But even without this specific ability to commit fraud based on legal contracts which steers power to people with the money and time to negotiate proper contracts, we can see a lot of different aspects of how the legal system skews things.

The first issue is usually that you can not clearly understand how to place a certain behaviour into the very large set of applicable laws. Is it a human right issue? Criminal court? Public law? Commercial law?

Fictions and Power Grabs

The second issue is abstraction, which forces you to not only know the law, but to know how the consensus among lawyers is regarding how the real world is subsumated into the law. This can vary over time and from court to court to and case to case. Which partially is the reason why the appeal system is in place. There is a fiction of having one law at the top of all instutions.

Then there is the question of legality still open. Today, even legislative branches create laws that are not necessarily permissible. And they remain enforced untill finally overwritten and voided by some form of higher court. Something that did happen for an entire period of 10+ years in Germany. But keeps happening around isolated cases.

The question here is was the parliament able to create that law or not. And the deciding instance — the supreme competent court — itself starts to set legal fiction by ruling over the legilsature. We also not only have more and more illegal law being passed. But also more and more competence on deciding — or not deciding and accepting — these laws by the supreme courts. Which creates an issue in its own right. The supreme courts are sidestepping the checks and balances and make themselves more powerful as they are. But it is accepted, because we accept the institutional failure of the parliament. But then both together fail, by maybe not strictly enforcing the law and allowing new illegal laws to stand. If you then also allow ruling by decree, which happened during covid and the legilslature and the judiciary are sleeping on an overstepping executive branch, then you are finally fucked. In that context, the existence of law itself is a nonsensical fiction.

Now it gets even a tick worse if you do not see the institutional failure as something merely structural. But you think of it as something where humans in high positions are deliberately breaking the holy rules and ethics of government. You easily end up and narratives like a “deep state” or “corrupt government”. While in fact your democractic party system fails to vet candidates on their ability to act in the spirit of a participatory and fair democracy. The tone of such institutions become more plutocratic.

But it can get even worse. Namely, if you not only have perosnal motive, but factional motive. If you have groups of people with close personal ties hijacking the system. Which looks a bit like the plain vanilla definition of faschism — a strong hand held by a few — or tyranny. But it is only tyranny, if the small team is going grossly against the interest of the land or community they govern. In history, if you served the wealthy well, you almost never were a tyrant. So it gets even worse when the few wealthy families start to control those teams or factions that are deliberately using a failing system of government for their aim.

That is then no longer a democracy, but a failed state. And the law in such a country is a way of manufacturing economic flows and benefits from one class to other other, weaponizing the law for unfraid advantage and ultimaley taking people without power hostage to a large system.

But that is not an issue of the law in application but a strict failure of government.

Back to the maze

Now, all this is not big news. But it explains how dynamic and pulsating and breathing the law really is. And how important it is for everyone to understand its way around it.

But even if the law was fair, and there was no advantage taking, and no politics and ruling inside of it, there are more gaps to justice.

Burden of Proof: The burden of proof is certainly one of it and known to many people who have endured physical and emotional trauma which is almost impossible to prove after a certain while.

Impossible Witnesses: The burden of proof that relies on collective statements of impartial individauls is neveral impartial because it includes common sentiment and views. If an entire society does not believe in sadistic, narcissistic or other forms emotional abuse, you very likely do not get any support or statement for going after it. It is also very hard to prove bias — which is why some legal institutions use juries and having a diverse set of jurors is important — of a witness and actor. And even harder to prove financial or other interest in a witness making a statement which may be direct or indirect. Something the mafia knows very well, but people with a lot of money know as well. So the concept of a witness itself is very tricky and a good lawyer and capable jury is needed to rule out a lot of issues. And usually it takes a lot of money to attack a case on all grounds. A clear bias.

The Cost of Fighting: The cost itself of lawyering up, going after something, financing the steps needed (private investigators, a whole legal team going through materials, etc.) itself is a burden that creates injustice and no proper insurances and support groups exist.

The “No one picks up the ball” issue: Finally, there is another issue with nobody picking up the ball. There are cases that are typically brought up by the public attorneys offices and fought out by the government themselves. But here, budget and resource constraints and lack of merit for personal career and competition among cases can lead to many cases not being pursued. And even if purusued, there can be counter cases opened. The laws about honors and false accusations often fall into this category and counter-suing can increase the cost of fighting which again creates disadvantages. Even with out laws to open counter-cases, there can be reasons to not open a case. Even having all right on your side, people barely go against people they are dependent on: spouses, policemen, employers, landlords, government authorities.

Dies in the tracks problem: Finally, almost nobody nowadays fights a legal battle till the bitter end. There are not enough courts and people in the legal profession to fight all to the end. A clear argument that our law has turned too complex. But most cases look like Party A opens and blows it out of proportion. Party B opens counter and blows out of proportion. A and B meet for settlement agreements and settle before anything is heard by any court ever. The entire game is completely defined by the pockets of the fighters and whoever has a bigger pocket can fight it out way longer. Unless there is gross violation by the richer party and he was stupid enough to leave enough tracks.

Advisors

Now, people always dissociate away complexities they do not understand. So no normal person thinks about all of this. But if you have enough money and you want to gain unfair advantages and you found your perfect law firm, you will commit acts that are clearly increasing your litigation risk and could be considered illegal. But you are running a very tight monitoring of your actions to remain within the fog. The fog we described above. If your party is weak and has no witnesses, the party is free game. You can kidnap, kill and put into chains. If the party is smarter and richer and more capable, maybe you deal with them via agents and you make sure you hit them when they are alone. You become more focused on psychological and emotional damage. And you maybe you find people in their circle of trust and network that are more vulnerable that can act as agents to the damage you want to inflict. You can even have war rooms and sit together and play it out how things unfold when you make a move. Now that people travel all the world, you can even stage things in other territories.

Now that’s the world we more or less live in. And the fact that we aren ot going after each other is likely more due to our time being limited and everyone being in need to focus on goals rather than the legal system.

The Warrior Class

I think I overpainted how dark and useless the law is. But it is clear that it does operate on a level that is opaque for many people.

If you look at popular documentaries on such matters, you typically find that you find people with minor disorders but a very low IQ end up in mental wards. While people with the same and much more grave disorders but higher IQ from socially lower backgrounds are ending up in prison. While the people from very high up normally do not go so much into prison, unless they messed with the bigger political shark.

You will also see that most family battles are fought over very basic emotional regulation needs which the parties are not able to handle. And instead of realizing how emotionally unevolved they are, they start to create delusional theories of what they should do — betray each other, have sexual side affairs, take money, go violent against their partners, etc. — and use these delusions to argue in court. If there is anything people can see is that they are damaged and entirely unaware of their own lack of emotional regulation capabilities.

When you move from family law to criminal law, you can see more pychopathic traits. But most often, you can find easily that there is also a delusion from constant gaslighting and abuse that lead these individuals into exploitative settings where they became desperate and their high stress levels made them become more impulsive and stupid. And hence they commit crimes that they get caught for. There intelligence may have given them the grandiose idea that they have special skills. But even this is a standard stress response and tied to some conditions that stem from a poor environment.

In most cases, all these issues stem from lack of awareness, lack of introspection, lack of agency over their own fate and lack of responsibility. It is almost always their own backgrounds that is causing the crime. And yet people are so unaware they are even proud of what they do and hence they are sentenced.

On the legal side of things you have people who are likely living in fear and uphold standards that cave them in, put them into a cage and box. People start to believe in God to not even think about having affairs because of teh social repercussions. They garden their small worlds avoid all types of risks and pain and stop living altogether because they are afraid of being hurt. Wallflowers we called them when they were young. And we have many powerful narratives that support this idealized and almost fetish like version of humans. Nietzsche called them the slave moral. And that is what it is . These people accept that their future is decided by teachers that give them grades on a bell curve. They choose to study something in college and accept that this is where they are good at for the rest of their lives. They can not accept that someone that did not study accounting may be better at accounting than them. Someone who ever studied music or writing may be a better musician or writer. These people are well governed by the law and they try to avoid any conflict with it.

But then, again, you have those that are smart enough to unerstand the law. They constantly learn to be more human without getting into social conflicts and with the law. They learn to take advantage of others without any moral but uphold a high moral standard and repute.

So in our world where little or nobody still walks around with guns and shoots people, the warrior class is inside of these fine men. And they, too, need their code of conduct. And the fights people fight are all about economic advantage and games of law.

The Singalling Effect of the Law

I think we have now found an understanding of what the law is, how it operates, who it addresses and who it hurts and who it benefits.

We can also see that there are two very deep layers of the law. Namely the law of equals and the law of unequals.

Since the Magna Carta, we have the common law. It contains both concepts. Namely, you can misread it as the law that holds equally among all humans — which is commonly applied — but may have some exceptions — like kings, government officials, etc. Or the law that is there to rule the commoners and the issues among the commoners.

For everything outside of common law, we have “arbitration courts”, “courts of chancery” and so forth. So there are still courts that start to exist not by decree of a ruling body, but by the mere acceptance of all involved parties that this court shall hold. Those are “laws of equals”. And in some courts, you can make any rule. “If you insult the pigeon of my house, you shall be decapitated” could still be a rule that could be enforced in some courts among nobles. Not enforcable by the laws and courts of the Common, but enforcable by the group who accepts these laws. The mafia has these laws. The church has it own. The sects and armies have their own. Rich people among each other have these laws.

In that sense, the actual law among equals is a set of codes that most of us have never heard of. The laws apply to some only after initiation or by pledge of allegiance of by revealing that you are part of the club. The moment you tell your friend you are in a certain society or uphold a certain standard, you are entering an agreement. So on the very basic level, these legal codes exist bilaterally between all humans.

But a big part of legal documentation and materialization is not about the law of equals but the law of unequals. Some guy with some power and without any relation to you tells you that you now have to follow a certain rule or he will send people after you to get you. That is the basic concept of the public law. The parliament tells you that you can now grow weed and you are happy and do it. Tomorrow they tell you that you have to sell your house and buy a caravan, you will do it. This part of the law of the unequals is that of a sovereign or a ruler that dictates things to you. It is the material law that binds you and punishes you.

But there is also the declarative part of the law of unequals. It could sound like “if you wake up, and you do not think about the ruling king as a loving person as first thought, you shall pay 100 quilt to the ruler.” and “any informatton on you or your spouse not thinking about the ruling king as a loving person has to be reported and failure will be punished by death.” and “This law shall be printed on a piece of paper and hung above your bed for you to see first thing in the morning.”

The law is of course not enforcable, because nobody watches into your head. But it does two things: it installs absolute control over you and creates a level of distrust in your own family. You can not know if your spouse ever rats you out. So you start treating your spouse differently.

So declarative laws of this kind are there to create the fiction of legal peace. “We will never start a war.” or “Every murder case will be solved.” and “You shall never lie.” create a code of ethics that people have to public subscribe to to avoid punishment. While at first people will resist the idea, but will submit to avoid punishment. Their children will maybe think of it as odd, but they will not challenge it and may even see reason in it. And their children will have ingrained mindsets and behaviours and attitudes that fully reflect the law. They will not lie. They will not accept a war. They will not murder.

Or at least they will not do so as long as they think that this is indeed reality. If they were told that there are plently of unresolved murders, and that in business people constnatly lie and manipulate each other. And that wars have to be fought to retain a certain lifestyle. What would they do?

The powerful effect of these laws is not only the submission they create. But the submission itself creates a cognitive dissonance that d nies any evidence to the contrary. If all your life you have never lied and people punished people that lied, even if you were told that everybody lies, they would not want to believe it. And even if they accepted it, they would never want to change into liars.

On a gross level given that only a few rebellious children and teenagers violate the law, most of them are not very trained in doing so, get caught and so forth, the social stability remains with the vast majority adopting the law as fact and given. Ignoring all the fog and injustices we introduced.

This is a very important concept to understand. And we finally come to the chivarly concept.

Chivalry

Now if the law always operated like this, and people never want history to remember what they really did, and the law was always on their side, helping to disguise things, then one key feature of chivalry or any honor code in armies and warrior classes is to white wash the reality.

The soldier needs the story of “fighting for the good” to accept having turned into a mass murderer of children. And the knight has to believe in God and his calling and his own nobility, in order to accept that his wealth is derived from abusing and taking from poor peasents who essentially are the foundation of every thing he has. Humans need good stories to feel good about themselves whey they commit acts of crime as a group and they do not want to feel dirty at night.

So the code of honor is a mental tool that helps the darkest souls and most evil actors in our society retain their composure when they look into the mirror. They kill and murder only when “justified”. When “deemed necessary”. When the “outcomes salvage the means”. They are good people.

On top, the own atrocities and pain inflicted on others, typically comes with a construct of self-inflicting pain. A harsh discipline, for example, the refraining from drugs or alcohol or women or leisure. The concept of self-sacrifice and tying pain to their own honor is important. Because it helps equal the scale of pain caused for others with the pain endured.

And it also creates a concept of sacrifice for the higher good, which is represented by the higher level ruler. Which overwrites the fact that they are taken advantage of by a selfish monster that brainwashes them into both doing the bad deeds for him and submitting to him instead of cutting his head off.

So the honor code is a beautiful work of art that helps the warrior class to indeed regulate itself. It makes the warrior submissive by asking it to submit to certain rules which are painful. The pain and discipline helps the ego create a grandiose self-image, which justifies looking down on the victims of their abuse. And helps them to put a barrier of “us versus them”.

The submission to the code is even better the more harsh the code is. The pain must be strong to wash away the guilt from the atrocities. And the harder the submission is, the more shame they should feel for being controlled by someone that writes the code for them. But humans are very stupid when it comes to someone smiling at them and giving them food and orders and benefits. They gladly take the emotional and mental abuse of being honorable fools for the smile and affection of their ruler.

In order to be in complete denial of this psychodrama with the ruler, they need an honorable cause that the ruler then represents. But this cause itself again is only a derivative of material facts. The material fact being that the ruler is the best manipulator and machiavellian negotiatior among all the top aggressive warriors. He keeps the checks and balances and spies and trap doors among his rivals to retain his seat on the top. Often fed by nothing but abuse itself. The ability to be so hyper vigilant, conning, dissociated from empathy and affect, we now know is the result of very strict mental abuse in the family system.

This is the game of honor codes inside of the ruling class. And you can find these mechanisms in every writing and documentary you find. A smiling white washing elite that does evil things for noble causes and day ind and day out committing crimes which they regulate as bad with the codes of law they pass on their peasants.

It is in these honors codes where we can learn a lot about the psychological mechanisms of shared codes of conduct. And why some start-ups create such highly effective work cultures and corporations don’t.

The rules of a culture are something that has to hook deeply into attachment and emotional and psychological and mental needs of the system and can only be created by very aware and capable humans. It isn’t something you design on a white board.

So Don Quixote was such a knight. Fighting windmils. Seeking meaning. I think today we see many people who wish to be Don Quixote. The narratives of influencers and Thaught Leaders are all of this type. It is why we today fight over whether there should be tampons in every man’s bathroom.

But. what we see overall is a high level of hedonism that in this context co-incides with a falling apart legal code that has turned too complex, holds too many illegal new laws, which are at will torn down again by an overly aggressive supreme court and where all level of the institutional architecture are falling apart on the lowest level courts to the way the executive and legal branches are operating and court cases and litigation is financed and executed. It is a complete mess and a complete chaos.

And this is why we see more and more arbitration. And more and more moralism in social movements. People are looking for a new code of chivalry. And we are all waiting for a new Don Quixote. For some it may be Orange Man Bad. For some it may be Jesus Christ. For some it may be Lucifer. But it striking how little we all try to do what I just did. Get our grips back on how the law works. And fix it.