Decentralisation is a trust - in the ability of people to care about each other. Most people are not transactional, but laws tend to make us so. Laws are about quantifiable and measurable things, what we owe to another, what we can demand from others, things like that. Societies are not like that ... they are organised very differently. If you ask someone for directions to a place, they dont demand a fee to give it to you (although Google does :-)) Children dont repay their parents for their costs of upbringing, nor do parents demand this cost (indeed, doing either would end the relationship). If you ask your neighbour for a pinch of salt, they dont write it down in a book as a due. Even poor people, who you would think have great need to be transactional in some things, are extraordinarily generous. There is a logic of everyday justice that we can build into the law, but it can only be done by leveraging society. It is of course prone to great exploitation as well, but that has always been true. Societies learned to overcome this risk - indeed, many primitive societies were more egalitarian than modern transactional ones. We must reflect on this.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 04:58:13 +0000