Outside is not above

Dec 14, 2010 21:45


Was musing lately over that apothegm of Bob Dylan's 'To live outside the law you must be honest'.

Which actually, I had to look up because I wasn't entirely sure how it ran, and my recollection was in fact 'To live outside the law you must respect the law'.

Anyway, my thought there was that if you have some objection to a particular law, perhaps you need to be more that usually precise about obeying other laws, both in order to point up that this is a principled stand, and on more prudential and pragmatic grounds in order not to get done over for minor offences (parking tickets, possession of small amounts of controlled substances, income tax evasion - oh no, wait, that was Al Capone - ).

Or does it mean that if you live outside the law you should be upfront about it, and not be a hypocrite or susceptible to blackmail?

This was all part of a nexus of thoughts I have been having, which I am still finding a bit snarled up rather than neatly unravelling, about the difference between outside the law/rejecting a particular law, and acting as if one is above the law.

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crime, law, honesty, resistence

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