• Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    They believe the law is a magic language, where if you learn the secret words and perform the secret rituals, you get to use shortcuts to bypass the normal rules. They see themselves as a secret society of law wizards, essentially. In some ways media has encouraged this by making contracts and such to be these arcane things with tricksy loopholes if you just figure out how to sneak through, but their belief goes far beyond what you might see in media.

    They also hold lots of contradictory ‘logic’ and opinion. Like that the government/corporations/someone is trying to screw you, and yet for some inexplicable reason they will instantly capitulate and be powerless if you speak the right words. It really, really has parallels to the concept of binding demons and such with magical contracts with the right magical words. Or the fact that they believe these things to be secret-ish and relatively unknown except by their peers, but at the same time become outraged when every minor functionary of any government or company doesn’t immediately recognize their secret words and capitulate.

    It’s as though the same sort of people who once believed in witchcraft and demons and all have adapted to the modern world where all that stuff is laughably false, but we all believe in ‘the law’ and ‘science’ and such, and therefore they come up with superstitions dressed in the clothes of law, but it’s still the same old stuff. It’s very similar to the bronze age man who sacrifices a goat or his daughter or whatever in order to get better crop yields.