What if the government is purposely creating a system that does not sustain peace in order to consolidate its control over non-conformists and to garner financial and political power to maintain control. It would be akin to planned obsolescence: A system where manufactured goods intentionally breakdown in order to increase consumption regardless of inefficiency and waste. Is the government promoting failing models to that the citizens will have to buy into the system again?

In law, the obsolescence of the criminal system as a deterrent and insurer of justice continues the prison industrial complex. If the law worked the way it is purported to work, then many jobs would be lost. Let's take Cohen's idea that courts maintain inequality: If most violence is caused by inequality and the legal system supports inequality, then the legal system maintains the violence under the guise of trying to mitigate it.

How do we move away from planned legal obsolescence? It would begin with Cohen's idea of basing legal concepts in either morals or empirical facts in order to make them realistic. To move away from systematic failure would mean acknowledging the failure. Then what? How do you use a failing system to change systematic failure?

TBC...

-- RachelGholston - 31 Jan 2012