Alternative Structures for a Civil Society

We are on our own.

This is a frequent refrain in this space. Across the entire West, our elected governments are failing to do the most basic job of protecting their citizens. At the same time we — the electorate — for some reason find ourselves unable to elect anyone who will remedy the problem, who will do something besides apply yet more socialism and kowtow to the mandarins of politically correct Multiculturalism.

Intertwined with the failure of government is the artificial constriction of the flow of information, due to the hardened-in-cement PC mindset of our major media and academia.

So, short of armed insurrection, what is to be done?

I have previously advocated the formation of alternative structures within civil society to accomplish the same things that government might otherwise do. In the United States citizens are still legally able to arm themselves in self-defense, and we in the blogosphere are forming alternative means of spreading information. Organizations like CVF can form to take up the slack where government bodies are failing us.

Europeans are not so fortunate: restrictive gun laws in their countries leave them in most cases unarmed. Their job is thus more difficult than ours, assuming that dissident citizens wish to remain within the law.

Yesterday in the comments to my post about SIOE, Zionist Youngster explained in some detail the same process as it is unfolding in Israel. I have combined and slightly edited his comments to prepare the account below.

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The SIOE demonstrators can try to defend themselves from the Muslims or the moonbats, but if that defense leads to any casualties on the latter side, you can rest assured the EU will remember its police and “the need for law and order” pretty quick.

Were the moonbattified authorities just comatose, meaning indifferent to events from both sides of the fence, there would be a way out: the proverbial “villagers with pitchforks and torches” could win the day against the Islamic colonialists and their Marxist enablers. The trouble is, moonbat governments are openly on the side of the evildoers, hence the good side will, unfortunately, find out that sheer numbers are insufficient. It’s not “We Cannot Protect You”, it’s “We can protect you, but we choose to protect the other side instead”.

If you ask what might be the solution, I’d say something on the model that’s being undertaken in Israel right now: an underground buildup of an alternative governance infrastructure. In less bombastic terminology, that means the official government channels exist but the people use alternative, parallel structures. In Israel, the official, moonbattified court system is being de facto replaced by religious (rabbinical) courts and secular arbitrage settlings. It’s a boycott of the government in all but name.

It means, when Israeli Jews in our day have a dispute, their choice is increasingly to avoid the official court system and follow one of two alternatives:
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1.		The rabbinical courts.
2.		Settling outside the court, whether informally or through agreed, third-party arbitrage.

In the former case, this works because the rabbinical courts have real power, even though they have never been mandatory (that is, Israel is not a theocracy). What is significant in our day is that many secular Jews have opted for those courts, hitherto used only by the religious. The reason for this is that, in contrast to the moonbattified official court system, rabbinical law does not, cannot, cave in to the PC fashions of the time. Hence, in cases of fear that the official court system will issue an unjust verdict, on the basis of “circumstantial evidence” or “history of victimhood” or any other such PC precept, the preference is to go to those courts where such precepts are barred. This is especially the case when criminal law and tort law are concerned.

In the latter case, the court system is bypassed by the acceptable venue of independent settling. The (official) lawyers are actually happy about this, because it takes off their huge amount of paperwork. The proliferation of lawyers in Israel has become such a problem in the last few decades that people just want to chuck it all out.

The courts are the clearest case of underground parallel structure formation in Israel. Charities (mostly religious, but also secular) are another case, bypassing the bureaucracy of the welfare state (the socialist welfare state of Israel, though somewhat eroded since the reforms of Netanyahu when he was finance minister, is still very much alive; but its bureaucracy is so labyrinthine that people just don’t want to bother). The police is also, shall we say, supplemented by community policing.

All in all, Israel today is engaging in a profound Hayekian makeover. Friedrich Hayek warned of the creeping ineptitude of bureaucracy and proposed local, community-bound solutions as the way to ensure the individual’s welfare. The local units, said Hayek, would be part of a national whole, but in a federalist, bottom-up way, not the top-down, socialist model that the EU now exemplifies so starkly. I believe few Israeli Jews have read Hayek; but, unconsciously, as a reaction to the moonbattery that’s infesting the country, that’s exactly the way they’re going. It makes me very proud to be here, part of this all, this bottom-up, community-driven self-healing.

As for the military: the recent mutiny against the order of expelling fellow Jews from their homes is, HaShem willing, the first sign of reform here.

Our governments have betrayed us; let us, then, show them that we can do quite well without them.

Some might get the impression I am saying the rabbinical courts are free of corruption. Not so, and not the opposite either — they’re as human, therefore determined by the humans peopling them, as the official secular courts and the secular arbitrage committees. The importance of the rabbinical courts lies in their theoretical basis. This is where things get interesting.

The adherents of historical materialism say, “Leave off all those theoretical underpinnings, it’s the facts on the surface that count”. But here I find (in great reassurance to me as an historical idealist) how false this view is, and how important theoretical underpinnings are. The West used not to be under the sway of legal moonbattery; after all, I don’t believe Roman Law or Salic Law or Napoleonic Law or any other system of law gave criminals protection from their victims as is the case today. But when this corrupt system, the system of Moonbat Law, began to spread from the 1960’s onward, what was there to stop it? Absolutely nothing.

Had it been declared, for example, that Roman Law was to be the permanent basis for law in the West, or even just one of the options (as is the case for rabbinical law in Israel), then things wouldn’t be the way they are now. But over the course of the ages, not just specific laws but legal bases have changed throughout the West. So when moonbattery ascended on the throne, it was just another change. The only way to counter this is to decide upon an older, pre-PC basis for law and declare it compulsory. But the officials of the EU are not going to yield soon, naturally. Independent communal efforts will have to do the trick here, too.

The judges presiding over the rabbinical courts may or may not be corrupt; but whichever the case, rabbinical law, with its long centuries of tradition, stands against moonbattery like an iron wall. Should one attempt to insert the precepts of moonbattery into rabbinical law, it would cease to be rabbinical law, for moonbattery is opposed not just to the letter but to the spirit of Jewish law. Thus, the rabbinical courts are a safe haven against Moonbat Law in present-day Israel, and this is the reason why today even secular Jews opt to peruse them.

Now for another point:

The problem we have in Israel isn’t the bureaucrats themselves, it’s the system. Suppose a man turns destitute, G-d forbid. He can go to the welfare officials for help. But that’s a tedious, painstaking way — we often say, “Hairs will grow out of your palm before you see the money”. Now, it’s not that the bureaucrats sitting there are totally unfriendly; in fact, many of them are OK guys, and quite willing to help. It’s the system — friendly though the bureaucrats may be, they’re shackled to rules that reduce efficiency (apologies for the understatement).

So instead, the man in financial trouble will get his help locally. If he regularly prays at one fixed synagogue, then he won’t even have to tell anyone — his companions at the synagogue will know of it very quickly, and promptly help him. It’s simply amazing to see this, but one-time charities are organized at lightning speed. That’s superbly efficient, because it doesn’t run against the rules of the system, because it’s outside the system.

All this rambling passage was for the purpose of making clear, that above the surface it looks as if nothing is going on, but below the ground there is a steady build-up of a parallel government, which one day will take over in Israel de jure as well. Because it’s under one’s nose, it doesn’t make the news — Yossi Public’s choice to peruse a rabbinical court or arbitrage isn’t newsworthy. But it’s happening. The current government of Israel, arguably the worst Israel has ever had, is being left to turn into a lifeless mask, with the nation underneath doing well with alternatives.