Take Off the Bow Tie: Stop Pretending Your Cowardice is Honorable

There is a legal obligation to obey the law. If you have a dying passenger in your seat, the law says you obey the red light. But it is immoral to stop and wait.

If democracy is destroyed by fraud, you still have a legal obligation to stay off government property, the same way North Koreans have a legal obligation to stay out of the Pyongyang capitol building. But it would be moral for the North Korean people to rise up and depose their undemocratic tyrants ruling them.

People's obedience to law comes from two orientations: (1) a sense of moral duty and (2) fear of consequences.

Most of our obedience to rules stems from our moral duty. You choose not to steal from your neighbor partly because you don't want to be arrested for it, but mostly because you recognize it is immoral to harm another by taking his property without his reasonable consent. If you went into your neighbor's unlocked home to take a teaspoon of sugar, even if your neighbor would never know, a sensation of guilt would be natural, even if you probably wouldn't be arrested for it if you were later caught.

Obedience to law by fear of consequences is the backup plan to ensure public order. A functional civilization isn't possible if a large-enough swath of the population within your jurisdiction obeys laws solely out of fear of being caught and facing criminal punishment. A functional civilization would require a significant portion of the population to work for the justice system to monitor that swath that need to be watched at all times to ensure they don't commit crimes. But, considering this hypothetical population contains a significant portion that only obeys laws out of fear of consequences, its monitors in its criminal justice system would have a similar proportion of the same kinds of people, making a just and moral society effectively impossible. If a people are corrupt, its monitors would be as well since its monitors are part of the people.

Not all laws are moral laws and/or followed for moral reasons. Some laws we follow simply out of respect for our system of representative democracy and to ensure its preservation. In the middle of the night, when no cars are around, you still stop for the red light and wait for it to turn green even if there is no logical reason to do so. Some jurisdictions don't allow you to turn right on the red light. Some do. If you're forbidden from turning right on red, and there are no monitors around to catch you turning right, you wait patiently, instead of turning, out of a duty to follow irrationally-applied rules more out of your sense of duty to the system you are a part of than your fear of being caught. While the law as applied is not rooted in moral considerations, the orientation of obedience still comes from the same place: a sense of moral duty.

What is the system we are a part of? Representative democracy is the foundation of law in the American republic we call the United States. If you believe (1) the 2020 (and/or 2021 runoff) American election(s) were stolen with fraud and (2) the legal mechanisms to right that wrong were usurped, ignored, and/or corrupted, you recognize the foundation of the system that steered you toward obedience no longer exists. Your moral duties and your legal duties now contradict each other. To repair the foundation of your system, you must disobey the very rules the same system enforces. Your decision to continue to obey laws not rooted in a separate moral foundation must entirely rest on your desire to avoid a bad outcome, the same desire that prevents North Koreans from speaking ill of their government.

The original American revolutionary recognized immorality in shooting a British soldier. He struggled with his moral repugnance for taking another human being's life against his desire to free the American people from what he saw as tyrannical rule by the British Empire. But he didn't suspect that his pleas to a British Empire court system being dismissed on procedural grounds and/or the King refusing to allow his independence after debate meant he still had a moral duty to continue obeying laws on trespassing property of the British Empire.

You can believe the election was stolen with fraud. You can believe there is some moral duty to avoid trespassing government property. But you can't believe both without admitting you are obeying law solely out of fear of consequences. Inventing some clever means to reconcile the two might make you feel better, as the desire to avoid seeing yourself as a coward is natural. But it won't be honest. And your pretense to convince others that the two can be reconciled fools no one. You are afraid. And that's natural. More people you can convince to back down and accept tyrannical rule means you'll feel less alone as you wallow in your own cowardice.

To the extent you make the aforementioned inconsistent beliefs known, I will not respect you. Nobody with critical-thinking skills possibly could.

So take off the goddamn bow tie. You aren't fooling anyone.