laws smaws

So there’s this gate keeper that’s standing in front of this door. He tells the countryman that cannot go through the door when, in fact, you are able to make the decision to walk right on through the door. One problem is however, that if the countryman goes through the door then he will encounter more terrifying gate keepers that will increase in horrification as the countryman progresses through each of the doors. The person standing in the midst of the gate keeper finds himself in a position of whether or not he should proceed through the doors to encounter more horrifying gate keepers. Fighting himself, about whether or not he should enter, the man eventually dies in front of the door. Nietzsche refers to this as weak and lazy because of the simple fact that we would rather just accept things as they are instead of trying to create our own. I don’t fully agree with the idea that we, as humans, like to merely agree with everything instead of creating our own. We, way back when, were the ones and still are today, the ones that created the law in the first place. Kind of like what De Beauvoir states when she says that you become a man or woman by conforming to social construction, we, in a sense, forget that we ourselves created the social construction. We created the things needed for someone to figure out whether or not they will be a man or woman and at the same time, create everything else around us. The force of a law is only how much we allow it to have. To an extent we can do whatever in the world we want to do. The countryman could have gone through the doors, and probably, no matter how scary all of the other gatekeepers would have been, especially if they all just stood there like the first one, would have just done nothing. We, as a population, are reified by the social norms we are created. We become these robots who, though we don’t realize it because “it’s the norm,” follow all these rules and don’t say anything about it. I don’t think we are lazy for following these rules and not wanting to create our own, I think we just don’t realize that we are following the law all the time. Whether these laws are human made or natural, like we wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when it goes down, we are ultimately run by them and, if everything runs smoothly, have no reason to change them.