I think a lot about the crustiness of law. I'm no libertarian, but I can't help but notice how law j

I think a lot about the crustiness of law.

I'm no libertarian, but I can't help but notice how law just accumulates and accumulates, once you have the rule of law. It's hard to create new law, but it's also very hard to get rid of it.

Once you write something down on a piece of paper, there it is. You have to burn the paper to make the words go away.

Do you know why cars all look the same now? It's because so many rules have accumulated around automaking that there just is not a lot of wiggle room any longer. There's a very thick crust on the law. 

In the chapter "On Great Events," Zarathustra claims that the greatest events are our stillest hours. Which I suppose is to say that much less happens than we might think. But then he advises that kings and churches should let themselves be overthrown, anyway, that they may again come to life.

As I said at the beginning, Zarathustra thinks it's better to die living than to live a long, slow death.

But it's also a way of saying that we focus on the flash bang moments of history, but sometimes the biggest changes happen slowly, such as when everyone in a nation loses the plot of being that nation, when values drift.

And we can forget why we have or even if we should have all those crusty laws. When New York Governor Kathy Hochul was on Odd Lots a little while back, she said they were using AI to identify laws and rules that New York State doesn't need any more. That seems like a good step!

But sometimes I wish there were legal jubilees. That we would just wipe all the rules off a sector and start again from scratch, justifying each regulation as we go, because over time lawmaking becomes a tangle. Eventually it costs millions of dollars to build a bathroom in a park in San Francisco.

Two chapters before this Zarathustra writes his breakup letter to the world of academia. Nietzsche also left academia and scholarship. He was too great for them. That's another world that becomes crusty. It accumulates. It's a culture of comfort and complacency. 

I'm not sure that Zarathustra would be with me that things should be razed though. The fire-dog is a razer of things, and he's not impressed by him either. I think Zarathustra is more skeptical of institutions than me. He's interested in the individual that stands out on his own, without comfortable sinecures.