"In truth," said the man who wasn't him, who - yes, Light Yagami could tell quite well, was simply a hallucination devised by his subconscious to exorcise the few last lingering doubts as to such an extreme course of action, a very mild case of disassociative identity disorder brought about by massive stress which was itself caused by the strange new world the notebook opened up, of course he was... "the old English system was best. A criminal was declared outlaw - outside the law. Since he had abandoned the law's strictures, he had abandoned the law's protections, and there would be no punishment for acting against him."
Snap, went the first shackle, and Light turned to look at it with an apathetic curiosity.
"A society without laws is a society without a government, because in the end, someone must always be coerced by threat of force. Without firm law, one particular individual can hijack the will of others - either preventing their achievements in the best case, or profiting without contributing in the worst. You remember your Hobbes, you read it when you were twelve. Without society mankind is in a state of war, and his life 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'. And society is law."
Snap, the second shackle, though these couldn't be real. A hallucination couldn't honestly manipulate steel and chain, which made this another coping mechanism conjured by his brain. An excuse not to move, perhaps?
Why was he cold?
"So to act against law is to act against society. Criminal acts are revolutionary acts. Breaking the law is treason. Because it is only law that keeps society together, and only by society that we avoid Hobbes's state of permanent warfare, of every man for himself, every human against every human. The criminal doesn't realise this, the criminal realises... x in ten are caught, x1 in x arrested, x2 in x1 charged, x3 in x2 convicted, and the odds x3 in ten become infinitessimally short. Every time a criminal realises the unlikeliness of his punishment, society allows a fraction more anarchy, and the nightmare spelled out in Leviathan becomes a fraction more real."
no subject
Snap, went the first shackle, and Light turned to look at it with an apathetic curiosity.
"A society without laws is a society without a government, because in the end, someone must always be coerced by threat of force. Without firm law, one particular individual can hijack the will of others - either preventing their achievements in the best case, or profiting without contributing in the worst. You remember your Hobbes, you read it when you were twelve. Without society mankind is in a state of war, and his life 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'. And society is law."
Snap, the second shackle, though these couldn't be real. A hallucination couldn't honestly manipulate steel and chain, which made this another coping mechanism conjured by his brain. An excuse not to move, perhaps?
Why was he cold?
"So to act against law is to act against society. Criminal acts are revolutionary acts. Breaking the law is treason. Because it is only law that keeps society together, and only by society that we avoid Hobbes's state of permanent warfare, of every man for himself, every human against every human. The criminal doesn't realise this, the criminal realises... x in ten are caught, x1 in x arrested, x2 in x1 charged, x3 in x2 convicted, and the odds x3 in ten become infinitessimally short. Every time a criminal realises the unlikeliness of his punishment, society allows a fraction more anarchy, and the nightmare spelled out in Leviathan becomes a fraction more real."