on the contrary, it’s a post-moral concept. prior to social contracts between language using people who share a community, anger amounted only to being expressed through instinctual violence. so for instance, if you came into my cave and took my favorite shiny rock, i’d try to bash you over the head with my club… but i wouldn’t think you were treating me unfairly or that you were violating some kind of agreement between us. here, i wouldn’t be able to feel resentment, because the structures of the civil contract that define such concepts as ‘fairness’ and ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ would not exist.
so anger and resentment are qualitatively different feelings, the former involving moral presuppositions that have to be in place before it can be experienced. so when i say you are still thinking morally when you conceive of the things that happened to me as being something that would/could be ‘resented’, you’re assuming that i’d feel some moral offense at these things. but i don’t, because i cannot blame anyone or anything for being treated ‘unfairly’, for two reasons. first, there is no freewill, and second, these modes of deception and corruption are built into the legal system… something that is characteristic of human nature in general, and the criminal justice system in particular.
my objection is not about the transparency of the sham morality that is believed to be the basis of law, nor about the hipocrisy, deception, incompetence, and corruption that runs rampant throughout it. these things are to be expected (since man is an inherently despicable creature). my objection is to something a bit more subtle and profound; that the system is not strong enough to not need to hide behind this facade of morality. what disgusts me is that these insects (prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges) are not faithful to their own principles and codes of conduct. not that they are opportunistic liars - for this is human nature - but that they are still pretending not to be.
be that as it may, being subjected to this political travesty at the highest level possible within the social contract fundamentally changes my relationship to the state. and it is a change that affects and influences every facet of my philosophy. this betrayal is a cornerstone of my thought. i am not interested in fiddling with the tedious, inconsequential philosophical ‘problems’ others occupy themselves with. my problems are of a different rank.
if i were to involve myself in trying to find a solution to this problem, this effort would consists of trying to locate and isolate the source of the problem and change the circumstances that allow it to happen. incidentally, i have traced nearly every detail back to a set of systemic characteristics that are intrinsic to the capitalist system. here i am not drawing attention to the inherent nature of man as an opportunistic deceiver and exploiter (this i accept), but rather the system that greatly augments these things rather than trying to subdue them.
you could say that this is the basic thesis, the basic premise, of my anarchism. and you might misunderstand me if your only experience with self proclaimed anarchists consists of hanging out with a few rebellious pot heads in sex pistols t-shirts at the local coffee shop. this is not anarchism. these irrelevant clowns do not speak for me.