The law is for stupid people

Legality/illegality is a bad tool for analysing human institutions. Too much moral pathos, too little substance. Much better concept is procedurality. Policies may not be legal, but they absolutely are procedural. Maybe states make illogical decisions, except it's not human logic, it's procedural logic, logic of a machine

As Kafka observed, when we're dealing with the state we are not dealing with humans, but with a machine. It's working procedurally, according to a certain algorithm which is ofcourse full of bugs. Which can be exploited.

In 1937 the Great Purge and mass arrests started in Russia. One guy in St Petersburg belonged to hereditary nobility & he knew he'd be arrested. He knew they'll be extorting confession & torture him to death. That's suboptimal.

He acted smarter. During the night he went to a store, broke a window. Got inside, filled his bag with valuable stuff and waited for police to come. They came, arrested him. He got 5 years of jail for robbing a store *as a regular criminal*.

Regular criminal track was so much better than a track of a spy/counterrevolutionary. That's how he survived the Great Purge.