Hammurabi's Public Relations: As Ancient As Sin

[Jace: Johanson]

I personally started off in studying legal land through Robert Menard and similar Freeman-on-the-Land gurus and theorists. As I was still, for the most part, a statist thinker, this appealed to me, because it plays into the idea that governments are still needed.

However, as I mulled it over, I found it lacking in a way similar to every other parqadigm before it, and I branched out to other theories, such as Randy Kelton's, Bill Thornton's, Winston Shrout's, and so on. I didn't spend near as much time on any of these, because I sensed the same void present in all of them, though I didn't yet know what the shape of that void described.

When I came to http://www.atgpress.com (now, apparently, defunct or moved) and started reading essays by The Informers and his colleagues there, I was still not personally ready to accept the idea that The United States wasn't, somehow or in some fashion, a good institution. A paper on the site (I no longer remember which) upset me some when it went through the history of the "country" and presented the idea that the USA wasn't real. It used different (and I believe less solid) reasoning than Marc's work and I was emotionally not ready to let the idea go, so I dismissed it and continued on with Bll and Randy and Winston.

I was working my way down a list of "gurus" posted on the Word Freeman Society forum, where our dear Marc happened to be last. After the exhaustive research in these other highly theoretical and legalistic approaches I was getting tired. I was, at the same time, also studying the other related topics of economics, philosophy, 9/11, the Fed, etc... ad nauseum. The whole process was taking a toll and the underlying splinter wasn't being removed.

One day, I remembered about learning of the code of Hamurrabi. All other such legal works I'd studied did not usually reach farther back Catholic Cannons, yet Hammurabi's Code is approximately 3783 years old, and was the oldest written code fo which I was aware.

I found a PDF and started reading, around the same time as I had reached Marc's name on my list and listened to a few shows. As far as Marc's show went, it was the clearest, simplest, and most rationally and emotionally pallatable material I'd yet seen. As I looked at Hammurabi's Code, I first noticed one thing:

The preamble to Hammurabi's code, in the PDF file, took up three and a quarter pages, and comprised of nothing more than a list of the gods/goddessess and their individual achievements or powers, to which Hammurabi claimed divine support for his rule. I remembered what I had only just recently started hearing:

"Is it possible that everything you think is real is just a PR scheme?"

I read on, and I noticed that, in far simpler terms than today, the code cantained every sub-form of modern law I'd ever heard of, from probate to welfare, criminal to civil, and anything else freedom activists of any creed voice today. There was not a facet of modern societal control structures I'd researched into that was not covered in this nearly 4-millenia-old legal decree.

But, what sealed the paradigm shift for me away from statism, was having to re-read the entire preamble text again, but this time at the end of the code. The entire code was surrounded by one thing, above all else:

A justification of "legitimacy" through seemingly endless appeals to divine authority.

Then came for me Spooner, Stefan Molyneux, Larken Rose and "Adventures," and by the end of '09, I was entirely sold.

I've recently looked back into the ancient codes and found that, not surprisingly, all the ones even older than Hammurabi's code were largely the same; be it the other oldest-known written codes of Lipit-Ishtar (1870BC), Eshunna (1930BC), Ur-Nammu (Circa 2100BC-2050BC); or one of the earliest known attempts at government reform in the still-more acient code of Urukagina (Circa 2380BC-2360BC).

The historically demonstrable fallacy of the idea of government is hard to support when you see that everything that exists now, existed then and all the time in between, exactly the same in substance, if less in refinement.

All sources can be checked at Wikipedia or any number of other places. What we concern ourselves with is that the Public Relations scheme of government is as old as sin and equally beneficial.

Peace.