Law is the raft of accumulated formal rules which has the supposed prime objective of perpetuating the state, but very often is manipulated by an incumbent group to retain power and provide ongoing access to state resources. Those laws concerning such matters as taxes, trade, immigration, transport, conscription and the like, are created in the self-interest of the state and bring any transgressor into immediate conflict with it. If the dissidents cannot overcome the intentions of the state by some means... devious or otherwise... then they will experience its physical will. Totalitarian dictatorships and religious hierocracies become so paranoid about their continuity, that every minute aspect of life is legislated for, and internal revolution only becomes possible when external disturbances disrupt the structure. Even in a supposed democracy... where rules are presented as being the result of majority influence... some of the laws are always biased towards the incumbent group being able to retain as much power as possible. Laws are enacted about who can vote and where and how, and what promotion facilities are available and so on, so that minority groups are kept exactly where they are. The executive members of a state enjoy the privileges and want to be there because of their ability to recompense their intrinsic worth with an adequate flow of state assets.

Conformity is imposed upon the general citizenry... by propaganda and persuasion to begin with... but ultimately by means of force. The consequences of transgression imposed upon groups and individuals by a state-organized system of retribution, has much more serious outcome implications than those resulting from simply breaking the rules of a grammar or a game. Life itself, freedom and rights are incorporated in the consequences of the laws of a state. Once apprehended, the individual can quickly lose all control over their participation in the society of the state where there is an effective policing authority to impose the system of justice. The ruthless social reality is that individuals cannot be allowed to put the state at risk, and laws without an effective and efficient policing system are essentially irrelevant.

In a democracy, where a significant proportion of the citizens influence the control of the law-making, the secondary concern of law becomes directed towards the welfare of the individual. Laws about rights and freedoms and equalities may be implemented and administered, so that the state support of rights... with respect to property, education and tolerance for example... can have considerable success.

On the other hand, laws concerning such matters as murder, theft and rape are entirely unable to protect the victim, and function only partially as an attempt at retribution and prevention. Such matters do not normally threaten the integrity of the state and despite public protestations to the contrary, the administration of justice is often imbued with impotence and indifference. Impotent, because protecting individual citizens from the predations of robbery and physical violence is essentially impossible. Indifferent, because the violation of one individual by other individual only rarely impinges on the security of the state. So indifferent does the state sometimes become, that even the rights of the victims are diminished in an attempt to compensate for its impotence. Thus when an individual kills in defending his or her life or property, the intended victim becomes an easy target upon which the state can demonstrate its power. The state usually has considerable difficulty in establishing the identity of the culprit of a physical violence, and a miscarriage of justice is a very real possibility. This is especially so in a system of adversarial reconstruction, where the objective is to win the case by persuasion, rather than to uncover and agree to the probable sequence of events. The state simply does not have the power to protect all individuals. If an intended victim has the opportunity to administer a justice of self-preservation directly upon the perpetrating culprit, then sanctioning such action would go some way to supporting the rights of victims.

After a moderate degree of habituation, law-makers come to believe that there are no practical boundaries as to what matters rules can be made about. Thus it is that laws have been created to specify when and where an individual can breathe smoke in and out, what the mathematical value of π should be, what plants one can nurture or not in one's garden, and what convenient state the global climate should be in. Laws are the contrivances of humans, and as a consequence are liberally endowed with the impractical and the absurd. The pragmatic course of action is always to support those laws that have been floated to promote both the continuity of the state and the welfare of its citizens, and to assist the remainder to sink without trace.