London Illustrating the Big Law/Small Law Principle

The basic principle was articulated by GKC, who said, “When you get rid of the Big Laws (You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and you shall love your neighbor as yourself), you don’t get freedom. You don’t even get anarchy (at least, not for long). You get the small laws. The country that used to be England has abandoned the big laws and has raised up a bunch of feral youth with no sense of love or obligation to the community that bred them to suck off the glass tit of electronic media and, for random fun, go beat up strangers and grab their stuff.

Now, to cope with the anarchy, Britain will have to endure the small laws: checkpoints, identification, security theatre and so forth. It’s the classic story: what could have been done easily by the people (i.e. parents) God actually sent into the world to teach young how to be civilized and not brutish morons will now be done with difficulty and inefficiently by agents of the state.

It’s a story as old as the Old Testament: God approaches us with love and wants to make our lives easier. We respond like fools and make our own lives vastly harder.

Fortunately, such societal breakdown is absolutely impossible in the United States. So we can all watch England burn in the serene confidence that our social bonds are nowhere near as frayed as all that. Our reverence for the Big Laws on this side of the Pond will never lead to a suffocating security state brought on by the selfish anarchy of a spoiled feral class that gives no thought to the common good.