Sleaze?

I am not a fan of sleaze or anything that isn't in the spirit of fair play. To me, anyone resorting to sleaze or some manner of cheating in things that involve/affect other people isn't exactly considered a good person, let alone a righteous one.

With that said, I can understand why people would want to resort to sleaze and/or cheating, and more importantly, why rule enforcers have a tendency to often times look away from the sleaze/cheating aspects. Now, a reminder: just because I can understand why someone does something doesn't imply that I personally condone it. Anyone who cannot see the difference between understanding a different perspective and agreeing with the perspective have some innate extremism that needs to be addressed.

Society as a whole is a complex web of relationships among people with some modicum of trust being tossed into the mix so that we don't inadvertently kill ourselves off. Formal rules in the form of laws or etiquette exist to ensure that as the complexity of the web of relationships increases, people will ``know'' what is considered normal behaviour so as to extend that sense of trust, all in the bid to reduce unnecessary inter-personal friction that can/will cause mayhem. I mentioned this idea of social lubrication before, but it was largely in the context of formal organisations in the form of corporations. Regular society has similar needs, with the sole difference that their hierarchy is defined organically as opposed to by fiat through a corporation's constitution.

The relationship between law and society is thus this: first there is society, then there is law, ergo society (in the sense of a group of people coming together either voluntarily or by happenstance) comes up first before formal rules of acceptable behaviour are codified in the form of law for other newcomers to learn quickly before they commit faux pas that may cost them their very lives. Natural law in the form of God's word ought to be considered as the universal principles that most if not all [human] laws will need to encompass at some point---deviations from it are generally not permissible for believers, and as for non-believers, they will have their reckoning at the end of the day. But putting that aside for the moment and just considering the non-supernatural aspects of things, the laws that are written by humankind need to be understood as formalised control mechanisms, a means of making explicitly what a particular society (and its embedded culture(s)) believe as acceptable behaviour, and the extent in which less-than-acceptable behaviour is allowed, and to what degree will they be policed/forced to comply.

The thing is, policing and/or enforcement of rules/regulations/laws is, at the end of the day, a trade-off equation. Total and absolute enforcement of all rules/regulations/laws is always prohibitively costly, and socially detrimental since there is no slack allowed for people to feel that they still have personal agency and/or free will. The other part of total and absolute enforcement that remains unsaid is that there is a critical mass beyond which the effects of total and absolute enforcement run counter to its intention, because of the simple trade-off calculus that if everything is important/controlled, then nothing truly is, since there is always a finite supply of effort that can be provided, while there are always new ways of circumventing what is essentially a finite list of dos and don'ts.

Going back to sleaze/cheating. Sleaze can be considered as the pathos way of convincing others to go along with something---while there is often some form of logic being applied when providing justification of their chosen course of action, these logic can usually be refuted quite easily upon closer scrutiny. The veneer of rationality is what I would describe sleaze as---it appeals to a much baser human emotion through the cover of a more dignified position. Examples of these include the mobsters who go around talking and acting as though they are some kind of pillar of society providing services that the actual authorities haven't been doing, or the more recent cases of ``KTV lounges'' being weakly ``re-pivotted'' into F&B joints.

The thing is, there will always be people who prefer satisfying/listening to their baser instincts. A truly pragmatic and technocratic governing system will acknowledge this, and provide rules/laws that regulate the behaviour to at least make all participants play safer within it; however, the price to pay for this is the loss of legitimacy among those who claim that the governing body has a moral role to play in addition to merely preventing the outbreak of chaos.

What then has the governing body got to do under such circumstances?

Like many things in life, if there isn't anything that can be done to improve matters, sometimes the best action to take is just to take no action, and instead perform more observation to look out for when taking some action is unequivocally more beneficial than taking no action. My take on this is that as long as the activity harms no one else, it ought to be allowed under the principle of self-agency and free will. If it will harm someone else, then it ought to be regulated to the extent that society is willing to pay for the price of regulation. All these should be applied equally regardless of the moral content of the activity involved---morality is based on one's belief system and has no place within general rule set of a pluralistic society. The only catch here is if the particular pluralistic society has decided as a whole that they would want to enforce a certain morality-based behavioural rule that it ought to be enacted---this must be through a referendum and not through fiat from the handful of representatives, mostly because the addition/removal of morals-based rules involve indicating the particular society's beliefs/principles (or even conscience), and is thus different from nailing down the finer details of the rules, which is what the representatives often do. So the correct chain of events is having a referendum from society to determine the principles first before having the legislators fill in the details of what will make up the body of law.

Everyone has their own sense of what a perfect society is, and I can't say that any one's version is superior over others. But I can say that if we choose to live in a pluralistic society, we ought to know that there are others who disagree with our beliefs, and that disagreement may only affect them and not us, in which case maybe they should be allowed to live the way they want. After all, they have to have their own reckoning with God at some point, as do we, and they have to justify themselves to Him, not us for them.

Till the next update.