Tea at Trianon: If The Rules Stop Working, People Will Stop Obeying the Rules

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, October 3, 2025

If The Rules Stop Working, People Will Stop Obeying the Rules

From Culturcidal:

What are we looking at here?
A violent, mentally ill, career criminal who has been arrested over and over again but has been treated with kid gloves every step of the way.
Against that backdrop, we’re supposed to be horrified that there are people who don’t give a damn about due process and think we should shoot this guy in the head and drop him dead in a ditch instead of going through an excruciatingly slow process where people will make more excuses for him, his lawyers will try to get him off on technicalities even though we’ve all seen him murder someone in cold blood, and if he’s found guilty, he’ll be handed over to the same justice system that has been giving him a “get out of jail free” pass for his whole life.
What’s wrong with this picture? I will tell you what’s wrong with it.
A lot of people look at the “rules” of our society in a very legalistic way. In other words, if it’s not written down and passed into law, then it’s not really a rule. However, this a very stilted way of looking at a society’s rules because they encompass much more than that. Morals, unspoken assumptions and reasonable expectations are all part of the “rules.”
For example, even if there was a law saying that butchers could secretly stuff their sausage with sawdust, the butcher’s customers would feel like he broke the rules if he did that because they expected to get food, but instead they got something inedible. The butcher could say, “what I did was perfectly legal,” but he’d still lose all of his customers because they would feel like the rules of how things are supposed to work between a butcher and his customers were broken.
Similarly, if you pay taxes for a fire department, you’re not going to get a packet in the mail explaining what your taxes buy, but you will still have certain expectations. You expect there to be a fire department. You expect the firemen to be well trained. You expect them to show up promptly if there’s a fire and make a good faith effort to put it out. Even after all of that, they may still fail and you could lose your house, but if they did what they were supposed to do, they at least lived up to the rules.
So, getting back to “due process” — it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, it’s one link in a chain that makes up the way we deal with criminal behavior.
It’s all well and good to say, “Due process is important!” That’s absolutely true, it is, but what about the rest of the chain that led to this guy being free to murder someone? Why wasn’t this guy in jail? Why was Jordan Neely, who famously died while being restrained by Daniel Penny on the NYC subway, still walking around free after being arrested 42 times? Why was Daniel Penny ever in a situation where he had to defend his fellow passengers from Jordan Neely? It’s because the rules have stopped functioning properly. (Read more.)