Time / Justice

Justice is impossible while time endures (and that’s infinitely): because agreement among intellects at stage_A, stage_B, stage _z9omega at time₀, time₁, time_n, is meaningless. Therefore democratic justice is impossible. Autocratic justice is also impossible within infinite time because whatever the intellectual stage of the tyrant, whatever the time, the evidence is not all in.

Human culture works by the majority, feeling itself to be the majority, feeling secure in ignoring input from extremes. Lock up, crucify, assassinate the genius, the saint. Call him a madman. Call the prison a sanitarium. Fill it with real madmen, so the ruse will convince all but the genius, the saint.

That’s how we persecute. It’s OK to kill Germans, Japs in 1945, but not in 1946. It’s moral to enslave in 1860, but not in 1870. In 1776 tarrifs were OK, but don’t tax my whiskey. In 15,000 BC there were no tariffs and no one would dream of taxing your beer.

The majority can always delude itself to think it’s being reasonable by being unaware of better meanings for reasonable. The court can throw improvements out of court. But even if every judge had an IQ of 180, it might just be that they needed IQs of 250. And if every single judge went to Harvard, he still hasn’t mastered Moses Harmon. Or Ivan Illich.

Trusting the Enlightenment was almost as grievous a mistake as trusting the Church had been.

But, pk: then what’s the solution?
There is none.

See? (Of course you don’t.) That’s the fundamental secular blasphemy: to fail to swallow the modern lie that we can fix anything and everything to our liking.