If there was one person who never had to abide by the official laws of any country their entire life, what could they theoretically accomplish?
One lawless person
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Is this some kind of philosophical question? Like: "Do we just behave more or less civilized because we fear punishment otherwise?" Reminds me of H.G. Wells, "The Invisible Man" and Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". Two characters that were able to escape the law and lost any inhibition. Read: They became immoral, selfish *some vulgar word for unpleasant person goes here*.
Is not living by any official law really some kind of accomplishment? If one could steal, rob, defraud for enrichment and not respect people's right to life and physical integrity… I fail seeing any accomplishment here.
The topic gets more interesting if we presume the person not bound to any laws still has some kind of moral integrity and takes the law into their own hands, becoming some kind of "Batman". That might in theory be helpful in some cases. I see a lot of requirements and preconditions that are hard to impossible to fulfill here. The person being legislation, judiciary and executive in personal union will certainly decide wrong at some point even with best intentions.
Is not living by any official law really some kind of accomplishment? If one could steal, rob, defraud for enrichment and not respect people's right to life and physical integrity… I fail seeing any accomplishment here.
The topic gets more interesting if we presume the person not bound to any laws still has some kind of moral integrity and takes the law into their own hands, becoming some kind of "Batman". That might in theory be helpful in some cases. I see a lot of requirements and preconditions that are hard to impossible to fulfill here. The person being legislation, judiciary and executive in personal union will certainly decide wrong at some point even with best intentions.
Well I could’ve phrased it better
What I mean is
If there was a person with no legal responsibilities or anything of the sort, what could they get accomplished with that alone? How high or low could their social status become?
What realm of possibilities would that open up for an individual?
I'm sure plenty of people are already behaving as if they aren't held back by laws and amassing fortunes as a result.
Think Neo when he learns to manipulate the Matrix.
Think Neo when he learns to manipulate the Matrix.
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I think it has to do with the general foundation of Morality, after all the original laws of the world and the basis of society in general came from the ideas of what morality basis of what to do and not to do come from, mainly religious but its bled through enough over time that it became the general rule of order for the most part.
Is social status that relevant? Indeed if there is something to survive the death of laws it would probably be that.
Anyway I will have to get that famous clip when some religious types were discussing "objective morality" (the idea that there is an innate sense of right and wrong in the universe, in this case coming handily to us in the form of this particular translation of the Christian bible) where they were basically "if I did not believe in God I would be robbing all the banks", which usually marks you out as a sociopath rather than a righteous.
"laws of a country" is tricky here as international laws exist. It would also depend on baseline laws of the country; where freedom of speech exists then yeah different game to places where it is less free, same for many other things that variously restrict things.
For examples one could probably look to various royalty in history as they were quite literally above laws. That said they stopped being a real thing some hundreds of years ago so eh.
But anyway back to the matter at hand. You are presumably not above the laws of physics in this one, and would also depend on the precise application of law here. If you as the lawless risked killing me then if I whipped out Mr Rifle and shot you dead would the law say my action was in self defence or are you so resplendent that I have to accept death?
Money is boring and arguably you could get enough of it that it does not matter so much. Insider trading would probably be where I go for that, though "protect your sources" (more on that shortly) becomes something you might want to do.
I then, and presumably rather boring to the "what if" crowd here, would be considering science and what could be done there.
For this and all others I will also have to assume aptitude, desire and ability; if you can barely tie your shoelaces or tell me what they teach 16 year olds the country over then that limits options too. However I figure the implicit assumption is you have enough intelligence to be dangerous in this one. Sociopath also comes into play here; nature, nurture... it is however noted most humans don't want to mess others up. Certainly you have the "to survive here you have to become insane" and whatnot as well (see gang psychology, or to a less extent "absolute power corrupts absolutely").
Biology then gets to be my first stop. Most places have edicts against cloning humans, combining human DNA with animal, general editing of human DNA, safeguards against certain types of research. The things you could accomplish there without such concerns are potentially immense, even more so if you have a few decades. Having a pit full of clone humans, humans bred with all sorts of genetic abnormalities and whatnot (even more so if you get artificial wombs going on) would be far better than mice, monkeys and rats. If you fancied twisting it to a negative then total world control under the threat of would also be within reach (if people panicked enough to implode the world economy over a slightly more contagious virus than normal that kills a few old people then imagine when you have the trigger on something like ebola mixed with measles, wherein 1 person infects 12 rather than 3 or so and death rate is basically 100%).
Though we are back to the Mr Rifle thing above; you would still be one human with need for 6 hours sleep or whatever. Your employees probably won't get too far with "just following orders" so you need to select carefully there, shield things, create plausible deniability (probably compartmentalising) and that is a management job all of its own, not to mention your smart people are smart so too many times of your company producing wonder treatment after some dubious experiments (if not before that) and yeah.
Nuclear power experiments could learn a fair bit, though capital investment for that to move the needle at this point...
You could probably do some serious psychology and sociology experiments. We presumably saw how those grievance studies paper people had others in the department get knickers in a knot over "papers" submitted to journals so bad that even a cursory read of a 10 year old should have said "this is bollocks, delete". Without such concerns, though again that is social consequences technically rather than law.
With big money you could probably do some fun with politics too. Economics as well; if injecting this much money does things then what happens next, though that is already mostly legal and largely a known answer (see where charities operate, welfare dependency and all the rest). In my case I have wondered about the thing I saw some years ago where someone put together basically a machine shop on a truck/container made it so it was reasonably learnable by those with a vague interest (and it is) and rolled it around to places that might otherwise struggle for paved roads and yeah. Repeat that a few thousand times and you are probably not even at "superbowl commercial" price range and also in doing so radically alter balance of trade in the world as capital startup costs are one of the bigger ones for factories here.
Buying companies to make them go pop just for fun. Though this is already done in various degrees; see vulture capitalism for the early ones, today it still exists but they tend to be companies buying ailing companies to turn them around as straight vulture has laws that trouble it (the fig leaf of that deniability maybe costing you a few thousand in lawyer fees over baseline).
Anyway I will have to get that famous clip when some religious types were discussing "objective morality" (the idea that there is an innate sense of right and wrong in the universe, in this case coming handily to us in the form of this particular translation of the Christian bible) where they were basically "if I did not believe in God I would be robbing all the banks", which usually marks you out as a sociopath rather than a righteous.
"laws of a country" is tricky here as international laws exist. It would also depend on baseline laws of the country; where freedom of speech exists then yeah different game to places where it is less free, same for many other things that variously restrict things.
For examples one could probably look to various royalty in history as they were quite literally above laws. That said they stopped being a real thing some hundreds of years ago so eh.
But anyway back to the matter at hand. You are presumably not above the laws of physics in this one, and would also depend on the precise application of law here. If you as the lawless risked killing me then if I whipped out Mr Rifle and shot you dead would the law say my action was in self defence or are you so resplendent that I have to accept death?
Money is boring and arguably you could get enough of it that it does not matter so much. Insider trading would probably be where I go for that, though "protect your sources" (more on that shortly) becomes something you might want to do.
I then, and presumably rather boring to the "what if" crowd here, would be considering science and what could be done there.
For this and all others I will also have to assume aptitude, desire and ability; if you can barely tie your shoelaces or tell me what they teach 16 year olds the country over then that limits options too. However I figure the implicit assumption is you have enough intelligence to be dangerous in this one. Sociopath also comes into play here; nature, nurture... it is however noted most humans don't want to mess others up. Certainly you have the "to survive here you have to become insane" and whatnot as well (see gang psychology, or to a less extent "absolute power corrupts absolutely").
Biology then gets to be my first stop. Most places have edicts against cloning humans, combining human DNA with animal, general editing of human DNA, safeguards against certain types of research. The things you could accomplish there without such concerns are potentially immense, even more so if you have a few decades. Having a pit full of clone humans, humans bred with all sorts of genetic abnormalities and whatnot (even more so if you get artificial wombs going on) would be far better than mice, monkeys and rats. If you fancied twisting it to a negative then total world control under the threat of would also be within reach (if people panicked enough to implode the world economy over a slightly more contagious virus than normal that kills a few old people then imagine when you have the trigger on something like ebola mixed with measles, wherein 1 person infects 12 rather than 3 or so and death rate is basically 100%).
Though we are back to the Mr Rifle thing above; you would still be one human with need for 6 hours sleep or whatever. Your employees probably won't get too far with "just following orders" so you need to select carefully there, shield things, create plausible deniability (probably compartmentalising) and that is a management job all of its own, not to mention your smart people are smart so too many times of your company producing wonder treatment after some dubious experiments (if not before that) and yeah.
Nuclear power experiments could learn a fair bit, though capital investment for that to move the needle at this point...
You could probably do some serious psychology and sociology experiments. We presumably saw how those grievance studies paper people had others in the department get knickers in a knot over "papers" submitted to journals so bad that even a cursory read of a 10 year old should have said "this is bollocks, delete". Without such concerns, though again that is social consequences technically rather than law.
With big money you could probably do some fun with politics too. Economics as well; if injecting this much money does things then what happens next, though that is already mostly legal and largely a known answer (see where charities operate, welfare dependency and all the rest). In my case I have wondered about the thing I saw some years ago where someone put together basically a machine shop on a truck/container made it so it was reasonably learnable by those with a vague interest (and it is) and rolled it around to places that might otherwise struggle for paved roads and yeah. Repeat that a few thousand times and you are probably not even at "superbowl commercial" price range and also in doing so radically alter balance of trade in the world as capital startup costs are one of the bigger ones for factories here.
Buying companies to make them go pop just for fun. Though this is already done in various degrees; see vulture capitalism for the early ones, today it still exists but they tend to be companies buying ailing companies to turn them around as straight vulture has laws that trouble it (the fig leaf of that deniability maybe costing you a few thousand in lawyer fees over baseline).
Was this thread inspired by a certain recent novel, or is it just a fun coincidence that this sounds like something out of the book I'm currently reading?
Just a coincidence, I haven’t been keeping up with any new novels
but what’s this new one called?
It's not the major storyline of the novel, just a plot point along the way, but in case anyone doesn't want to get spoilerised...Just a coincidence, I haven’t been keeping up with any new novels
Project Hail Mary, the recent novel by Andy Weir, the guy who wrote The Martian (novel the movie was based on).
It's not a "for their whole life" situation but rather as an emergency measure.
It's not a "for their whole life" situation but rather as an emergency measure.
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