"All right, maybe nation-states don't have the authority to make law. But why would you? Who do you think you are? What gives you the right to put up a website like this? What makes your 'Law of the Earth' real?"
It's a fair question, and the answer may surprise you.
We don't have the authority to make law. No one does. That has been the whole argument of this site. And so we have never claimed it.
We are not making anything up
The Law of the Earth is not a set of rules we invented and now want to impose on you. It is a report: our best attempt to write down a law that already exists, and that would exist exactly as it is if we had never written a word.
There are two very different kinds of authority, and the whole question turns on the difference:
- The authority to command. Do this, because I say so. This is what every king, legislature, and government claims. It is what we have argued no human being possesses.
- The authority of an argument. This is true, and here is why. Check it yourself. This is the only authority a mathematician has. It isn't something anyone possesses. It belongs to the reasoning, and anyone can test it.
The second kind is the only kind we claim. A mathematician who publishes a proof isn't asking you to obey her. She is asking you to check her work. If her proof is sound, it is true whether you like it or not, and whether or not you've heard of her. If it's flawed, anyone may point out the flaw, and the proof falls, no matter how impressive her credentials.
That is exactly the position of the Law of the Earth. We are not asking for your obedience. We are asking you to check our reasoning.
"So where did you discover it? In a treasure chest on a desert island?"
In the same place Newton and Leibniz found calculus. Where al-Khwarizmi found algebra, Euclid found geometry, and Pythagoras found his theorem.
These things are simply true, and any mind can work them out, with no outside verification needed. Nothing is required: no telescope, no microscope, no instrument of any kind. Just a mind. A pencil and paper help you keep track, but even those are optional. A functioning brain is all it takes to discover mathematical truth.
Law is the same. Law is mathematical. It can be worked out through reason, by anyone, honestly following an argument wherever it goes. We have no special access to it. Neither does any priest, judge, professor, or president. It is equally available to you, right now.
"Then why should anyone listen to you?"
They shouldn't, simply because it's us. That is the point.
Don't accept a word of the Law of the Earth because the Earth Party says it. Accept it only where the reasoning holds. Test every line. If you find a premise that is false, or a step that doesn't follow, tell us, and if you are right, we'll correct it. We say openly that we may have made mistakes somewhere. Claiming that our work is beyond question would be intellectual totalitarianism, and that leads quickly to the real thing.
But a disagreement has to be an argument. "I don't like this," "this is baloney," and "who do you think you are?" are not arguments. Show where the reasoning fails.
The authority question, turned around
Notice something. We claim no authority over you at all. We ask you to obey nothing and no one, us included, beyond what your own reason can confirm to be right.
The systems you were raised to obey claim far more. They claim the authority to decide right and wrong for you, to change it at will, and to punish you for disagreeing. And when asked where that authority comes from, they have no answer.
So the question "what gives you the authority?" is the right question. It's simply aimed at the wrong people. Ask it of those who claim to make law. We'll explore their answers in the next three objections:
- But laws come from nations and governments!
- But laws come from God!
- But laws come from the consensus of the People!
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Other objections: This is crazy, silly, woo-woo!