Symbolic regulatory systems like the rule of law do maintain a stability when it comes to the movements of the vast undercurrents of emotive energies. However they bend and contract with power. The symbols are reconfigured to legitimize the necessity of power. When the power of the powerful is diminished in a closed system (due to external influence or internal reconfigurations), the powerful necessarily regain their loss by contracting around the powerless. At a time when we see banks, governments, police, and much more forging symbolic narratives to legitimize their exercising of naked power to continue accumulating power, or at least exercising naked power to assist the powerful in accumulating power, or to retrieve what was lost, or to maintain what is had, we shake our collective heads in despair. However, witnessing a great contraction like this bears a certain grim gift: through a contracton of a social order we see how it actually works. As the platform that we stood on to view our affairs morphs and bends, our attention shifts to the platform itself, and we see clearly its many working parts as it rips open.
What deep principles account for the miraculous functionality of law? As I drive on the freeway late at night, the few cars out could easily swerve whichever way they wished, though each one including myself glided forward in clean straight lines. Law is established under the fear of force at its base: you are threatened with a fine (which can be viewed as economic violence) or worse if you step out of line. If you refuse to pay fines or even go to jail, you are beat about on the head. So everyone starts to act in accordance with law for fear of retribution, the rules become internalized, and everyone goes on acting that way in all conditions. But there is even more to it than that. Brute force is incredibly inefficient if it is conducted in a behavioral climate of radical competition. Violence begets violence, and soon the arena becomes a competition of whatever brute power can amass itself to overpower whatever is antagonizing it.
There is an ancient, and perhaps eternal tendency of living things (and even physical phenomena) to display the impulse to act in concordance. What I mean by this is that at a primitive emotional base, people or animals cannot stand for their peers to acquire a good, or grow in power, without themselves receiving the good or power as well. The same can be imagined for its converse: that nagging guilt when we see others suffering but not ourselves may very well stem from a deeper chain of evolution than mere human social evolution. Heat dispersing into the environment comes to mind, or the molecules tearing from their bonds with greater ease as more of them in a cluster are pulled apart, such as a piece of fabric ripping. We developed internal regulative systems to mitigate the possible instabilities of multiple entities in competition over limited resources (morality) and then systems of law to achieve such aims on a larger scale. This ingenious generation of structural integrity can be compared to engineering inventions: if the stress is distributed more evenly across a structure, the structure is far more likely to last.
With a social rule of law that assumes that all individuals are equal, each individual participating in the code can expect to be treated equally, with equal rewards following the adherence to the code and equal punishments for breaks from the code. Theoretically this should regulate the distribution of powers and emotional energies quite nicely.
However over time asymmetries develop with power pooling in certain areas, and the powerful almost always gain the ability to write the actual code for the regulation of the greater system. The law increasingly mirrors the actual imbalance of power, while maintaining the semantic quality of an equal opportunity system of rewards and punishments, so that it continues to serve as a stabilizing agent, but develops strains as the population becomes aware of its dysfunction. What is required to maintain it is constant media engineering and propaganda.
