How comfortable are you in breaking a law–with morally good intentions?
Some fairly contemporary examples:
In 1930, Gandhi had the audacity to publicly make his own salt when the British Raj made it illegal to do so.
Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer in 2011, systematically downloaded thousands of academic journal articles from JSTOR. He wasn’t necessarily a super hacker. He just found a loophole in the JSTOR and MIT systems.
Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, leaked lots of raw data to the general public.
Enric Durán in 2008 borrowed $642,306 from 39 different financial entities with absolutely no desire or intention to pay it back.
A farmer wasn’t allowed to build a stable on his farm. So he built a gigantic stable and disguised it as a giant dining table. “You can’t stop me from building a dining table”, he said.
Chicago was not allowed to have casinos on land. So they built them on ships.
A lot of very talented people, who cannot get a work visa, cannot enter USA‘s highly sought-after Silicon Valley. So they built a ship 12 miles from Silicon Valley. Something that falls out of US jurisdiction, thus eliminating the need for a work visa.
All the examples above illustrate loopholes in the legal system, or demonstrate somebody’s audacity to mock it.
While we respect the law and let words govern us, we should always be conscious of this limitation and have the audacity to challenge the system, even if it requires us to be imprisoned. We are much bigger than something as limited as language. Words have never sufficed the human race.
