If those higher ideals involve helping the poor, then every institution can act like Robin Hood. Every politician is an actor, every debate is a performance and every victory is a chance to gather more spoils.The idea that there should be one law for all, rather than one law for the sufferers and another for those who aren’t suffering, is alien to a society where empathy trumps law. Everyone is a muckraker, and everything is a muck of competing narratives because everyone is a victim and everyone is dirty at the same time.There is no law and so every case, every incident is political, because law is made on an ad hoc basis. Or the question may even arise whether it has such ‘conscience’.And maybe it is the reason that Durkheim said ‘a conduct does not shock the human conscience because it is criminal’, rather it is criminal ‘because it shocks the human conscience’. That is what they wanted, that is what they got. The farther away we travel from 1788, the less that the foibles and frailties of the Framers affect us. The Bill of Rights is the embodiment of the “inalienable rights” dictated by the Declaration of Independence, upon which every Federal law, State law, State constitution and the United States Constitution are based upon. The violence that you see is calculated to turn Malawi into a lawless state. Unless by the punitive and retributive measures we enforce, we manifest our collective shock or outrage against the conducts of the deviant members of our community, we provide no verifiable proof that we find such conducts offensive or intolerable; or that we care at all that they violate our ‘collective conscience’.On the contrary a wantonly permissive society betrays the absence of a ‘collective conscience’; and truth is only a conscienceless or an unconscionable society is incapable of being jealous of its ‘collectively supported morality’. The blame always goes to one side, the side blocking their agenda.A society that lives by law can have laws that mean something, but in a lawless society, a law only matters so long as it serves the purpose of those in power. If it has the capacity to shock or to outrage the collective will, then a conduct must be offensive enough to be ‘criminal’ –such as gay marriage in a society that is collectively outraged by it –not in a society that does not feel violated by it.
There would be few severe restrictions on government power. Every reasonably organized society and which is guided by the ‘collectively supported morality’ is bound to be shocked or even outraged by the deviant behaviour of any of its members which violates its collective conscience. If the Supreme Court threatens to investigate the Constitutionality of the law, threaten the Court.The only thing separating tactics like these from the mugger on the corner is public interest. Shakespeare, in his tragic-comic play ‘Measure for Measure’ likens it to “an overgrown lion in a cave that goes not out to prey” –so that over time it becomes more mocked at than feared. Nor would there be unlimited Freedom of Speech. The very few good and honorable people would be in trouble.
Optimized by It does not matter that a society has not formally coded that particular ‘conduct’ or behaviour as unlawful. The new science also has the appeal of what is called "ubiquity". How we are able to be boisterously shocked and outraged by a thing in the morning, and yet be amorously in bed with it at night, can only be exciting to the Durkheims of this world who apprehend it as a subject of academic enquiry and not as an existential problem to live with.And this ‘collective hypocrisy’ is not helped by the fact that Nigeria is already the ‘anomic’ nation also of Emile Durkheim’s other theory; the theory of the ‘normless’ society; or the acute state which he said a society inevitably finds itself after a long period of total breakdown of its normative and moral values. It isn’t mugging you because it likes the smell of money, but because it wants to help those less fortunate. Is that society to begin the argument that society is unfair. There are entirely too many people who have absolutely no regard for the rights of others. We are a cross between two undesirables because we are adept at playing only the ‘collectively hypocritical society’. Meaning that whenever we are collectively and spontaneously shocked or outraged by a conduct, then that conduct is criminal –and that is even if that our statute books have not documented it as such.