The Wizarding World is One Big Mess

[starpaint]

Wizarding government works under a hellishly disjointed system, and I have some trouble making sense of it, because it’s pretty much a slapdash job. A lot of very intelligent people have written essays on this topic, and those are better and more worth reading. The thing is that those essays tend to tie the package up very neatly,

Comments

[author_by_night]

Oh, the MoM's definitely messed up. Not just that way, but in others.

Actually, the whole Wizarding World is. Not that I really blame people - two (going on three) wars with evil overlords, not to mention much panic in between.

[starpaint]

Quite a bit of panic, very few good leaders, and no real interest in improving society or their way of life in the aftermath. They want to maintain a status quo that's about 200 years old now, as I guess they maintained one for at least 700 years before. They haven't exactly made it any more difficult for people to get their hands on books with dark rituals in them, have they? Haven't made it more difficult to get illegal artifacts, if they're all on sale in Knockturn Alley. Haven't cracked down on all the people with illegal goods who perform illegal spells and sell products made with illegal ingredients. What they need is an infusion of the NYPD. It really makes my head hurt, because it's not that they're trying to fight it and failing; they're really not even trying.

[visservoldemort]

The problem is the size of their population and its decentralized nature. You can't recruit a police force large enough without having more people policing than people to police, which is both an economic and moral/philosophical catastrophe. Furthermore, there are no wizarding urban environments, so its very difficult to control this spread out population, especially in light of the need to maintain secrecy. And if someone really wants to go to ground, all they have to do is go live amongst muggles for a while, and use their means of transport to leave the country.

[author_by_night]

It is very decentralized, and no one takes the laws they do have very seriously, so breaches, however dangerous, are very common. The world's incredibly amoral in that and a lot of other respects...

The problem is that they had no interest in setting up an independent society under an independent rule of law, which makes everything I said up there impossible. I don't think the lack of an urban environment is the problem, so much as the lack of any kind of independent environment. One Wizarding village in all of Great Britain; how's that going to help? It encourages them to leech off of the successful Muggle society, which at this point is a few thousand times easier than attempting to set up their own, and that contributes to its wacky nature. And in the meanwhile, the Death Eaters and Voldemort are attempting to butt heads with the Muggle world, and, all the while, attempting to maintain its separation. Or domination. But still a separate class. Yet they can't give up any of the commodities they're dependent on, which they're

[visservoldemort]

For all intents and purposes dear, you've just described international law, which basically is a set of guidelines that states follow when it's in their common interests to do so. Think of wizards as countries and the Ministry as the UN (perhaps Gringotts as the World Bank-though maybe the IMF might be more accurate-and St. Mungo's as the International Red Cross/Red Crescent) and you've basically got a perfect analogy. The only time when anyone is punished or forced to do anything he or she doesn't want to do is when they're either extremely weak and insignificant (Mundungus Fletcher being arrested) or doing something that is evidently beyond the consensus of all members of mainstream society (Death Eaters). And even in the latter case, it takes a larger Great Power to really intercede to enforce the matter, i.e: Dumbledore. In that light, Albus Dumbledore is sort of the United States of America of the Wizarding World.

*grins* That last bit is a bit of a stretch, I'll grant you. Though I definitely see Voldemort as a Nazi Germany,

[starpaint]

It is, a little. Except that's really only applicable in major, major breaches of the law, when order's past redemption already. The international community isn't going to intervene unless (or even if) there's some sort of genocide. And that takes it a little out of this analogy, unless you want to compare Voldemort to something up there, and the problem with him is that he's just too strong and elusive to contain.

On smaller things, though, just the ordering of society. Every country involved in international law has some sort of legal code, most of them pretty well-developed and generally followed, whether or not they're good ones. Individual states will retain their order whether or not international order breaks down, and, in the unlikely event that the world goes into a total anti-globalization crisis, we'd have huge shock effects, but I think we'd come out alive. There's no such equivalent for the wizarding world. If anything was to happen to their system, their entire pseudo-society would collapse.

[visservoldemort]

But individual wizards, with their individual ability to do magic, would survive, unless actively destroyed, which is just the same as a state. The analogy isn't perfect, but I think it is relevant.

[starpaint]

The individuals would. Whether the individuals could carry off their lives in a meaningful way when they can't function in Muggle society and apparently can't conjure all of their needs is another question. They'd probably have to steal; someone would eventually get caught; we'd get persecution; and even before all of this happened, we'd have mass hysteria, because the collapse of the system would be joined with a kind of crazy anarchy in the few institutions and villages and streets that are theirs.

s'a good analogy, but it's also a very, very complicated one, with so many variables that I don't think we'd be able to glean much more from it.