The 5th Empire - Abortion

The 5th Empire is a private law society. This means that people are free to come up with sets of rules for themselves and their family. The head of the family typically rules by decree as he or she wishes.

This is no different than how households are generally run. The only difference in the 5th Empire is that it's none of anybody else's business how a particular household is run. Nobody outside a household can set any rules as to whether smoking pot in the living room is legal or not. That decision belongs solely to the head of the household.

The same goes for how animals are treated. The only animal rights in the 5th Empire are those granted by the head of each household. It's none of my business whether my neighbor tortures his cat for fun. The 5th Empire has no legal avenue for me to stop him. I can tell him to stop. I can attempt to have him ostracized from the neighborhood. I can even steal his cat and set it free. But I can't take my neighbor to court.

The reason for this is that a court case in the 5th Empire requires a plaintiff and a defendant, and the plaintiff must prove personal loss in order to win. There's no personal loss to me that my neighbor tortures his cat, so I can't bring forward a case. Only the cat can do this, and that will never happen.

Shockingly perhaps, the same goes for unborn children and toddlers. No-one outside the family have any legal rights to interfere on behalf of such defenseless people. If no-one inside the family objects to an abortion, or some miss-treatment of toddlers, there can be no court case against such acts. It's simply none of my business if my neighbor's daughter has an abortion, or mistreats her children. It's a family matter.

This is the price we have to pay for living in a truly voluntary society. We have to let people play by their own rules, even if their actions are horrible and reprehensible. If there's no plaintiff, we can only resort to the measures suggested above for the cat. If this is too much to bear, then there's only two alternatives:

1. We have to grant a body of individuals the right to rule over our private affairs
2. We have to form a body of individuals to force our rules onto others

We have to either accept the state as a legitimate organization, or we have to become the state itself.

Most people have some issues that they are very passionate about, and are therefore inclined to opt out of the 5th Empire. They'd rather subject themselves to endless arguments back and forth than let people decide for themselves what rules they want to live by. Some go so far as to say that the 5th Empire is satanic. If there's no laws against cannabis, animal cruelty, or abortion, then there can only be one explanation for this. It must be Satan.

But this misses an important point in Christian doctrine; namely the distinction between laws among men and laws by God. When we sin without causing damage to a party capable of proving personal loss, it's up to God to hand out punishments. We're not supposed to install a state on behalf of God, where some people pass judgment onto others, because no-one is so pure that they can do this properly.

This is the central distinction between Islam and Christianity. Islam encourages believers to form legal groups like the Taliban to enact the will of God. Christianity encourages people to refrain from such practices and leave it to God to take care of the sinners on His own. Court cases are always between individuals with a personal and direct relationship to each other through some action or circumstance. It's never between the state and an individual, and it certainly isn't between God and an individual.

To find out which of the above mentioned arrangements is satanic and which isn't, we only need to look at historic results. How much damage has the state and state focused religions like Islam caused relative to that of people living according to private laws? Where do we find freedom and prosperity? Where do we find misery?

The answer is clear. The state is not a good option for those of us who love freedom and prosperity. The state will not stop at one pet hate, such as abortion. It will incorporate all sorts of other things, until it becomes a totalitarian system. Once we give power to people to rule over us, there's no end to how many laws they will enact in order to keep us and our neighbors under control.

However, if we content ourselves to rule over our own domain only, and accept that others are sovereign rulers as well, we're not only likely to prosper, we're also likely to see very little moral misconduct.

My neighbor doesn't torture his cat, nor are his daughters anything but good mothers. This is not because of any laws. It's because they are good people, like most of us. Bad people are rare, and they are especially rare in free countries where there's a distinction between God given laws and man made laws.

Portugal has a long tradition in this respect. The St. Vincent Panels from the 15th century depict this distinction by portraying clergy and nobility as separate. The message is clear, some affairs relate to God, others relate to man, and we must never seek to mix this.

This tradition is still very much alive in Portugal, and is the reason Portugal is both among the most religious countries in Europe and among the most civilized.

St. Vincent Panels with clergy to the left and nobility to the right

By Georges Jansoone - Self-photographed, Public Domain, Link