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 machineAs 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.

Procedural, not legal

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.

Hacking the system to avoid the gulag

The rich usually know they're not dealing with humans but with a procedural mechanism. It's one think they found through education :)  The system can and must be hacked, you just need to find a bug. Rich kids don't get to the trenches no matter what is written in the law. Why? Well because smart people don't give a fuck about the law. For a smarter, successful person the law is not a moral imperative, but a stupid algorithm to be hacked. And they'll figure out how to hack it.

The rich hack the algorithm

Some people read Kafka and get depressed. Other look at his work as a guidebook for success. 

@kamilkazani: Captain Farid Chitav and 11 his subordinates from Russian National Guard (Росгвардия) refused to go to Ukraine. Their regiment from Krasnodar was ordered to Ukraine and they objected. They said that th...…

Interesting Philosophy

The law is for stupid people

Kafka's stories aren't just about annoying bureaucracy, they're about bureaucracy that is so soul-crushing and illogical that is goes well past tragedy and comes back around as comedy.

What is "Kafkaesque"

"What’s Kafkaesque... is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces."

Logic goes out the window in Kafka's writing. Or rather, the logic seems to be governed by some kind of snake-eats-tail, circular thinking.

Illogical in Kafkaesque

"You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque."

Kafka's "due process" is always serpentine. Legal systems do not exist to serve justice, but to perpetuate themselves. In every circumstance, though, Kafka points out that we, the cogs in those machines, can be just as absurd and illogical as the machines themselves. Especially when we keep trying to fight the system with the system, following rules that make no sense to achieve goals we don't necessarily want.

Kafka Due Process

Kafka laments and lambastes absurd bureaucracy in all his work. But he also invites us to notice the absurd part of everyday life and to laugh at it—lest we keep perpetuating the absurdity ourselves

Laugh to Absurd Life

"Kafkaesque" means a system that has no vested interest in doing anything but keeping itself going, alienating everyone in the process.

Keeping Itself

If you were to awake one morning and find yourself transformed into a giant insect, you might call the situation "Kafkaesque" (although it would probably be difficult for you to pronounce the word through your giant mandibles). You wouldn't be…

Philosophy and Life

The Meaning Of ‘Kafkaesque’ Is About More Than Just Pointless Bureaucracy And Giant Insects

Movies about law, having heroic or ferocious lawyers often strike gold in Hollywood, giving good competition to big-ticket movies.
To Kill A Mockingbird, a 1962 adaptation of a book by Harper Lee, had the character Atticus Finch, a fictional lawyer who became the greatest hero of all American cinema in a list ‘100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains’ by the American Film Institute.

Hollywood’s Love For Movies With Lawyers

Well-known movie stars like Gregory Peck, Tom Cruise and Kevin Costner have portrayed lawyers.Movies about lawyers, like Gandhi, 12 Angry Men and Philadelphia have made it to the Top 50 movies of all time in the ‘100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains’ list by the American Film Institute.

Big Movies With Lawyers

Law movies offer legal wisdom and often have justice prevailing in the end. The audience is enthralled by the wit and the voyeurism, where internal details are filled with drama and mystery, offering an inside look at how a lawyer stands up for someone in the court of law.The human experience, vulnerable and raw, is on full display in legal stories, whose choreography, twists, and impossible odds are loved by filmmakers and the audience.

The Thirst For Justice

Revenge has a universal appeal, as does the righting of something wrong or unfair. Justice is first denied and then reclaimed by hard work and sweat, with the audience rooting for the lawyer in charge of setting things right, facing hard challenges.Law movies do not portray a real courtroom, but change their pace in order to be entertaining. The audience are not looking for accuracy, but a good story that gives justice to the one who is mistreated by law, and to put the real wrongdoer behind bars, whatever it takes.

The Magnetism Of Revenge

The audience is looking for an escape from the mundane reality and an action flick often does not provide the mental stimulation or an uplifting of the human spirit.&nbsp;They would prefer a courtroom drama, where heroism is not shown by muscle power, but by the presence of mind, resilience and legal chops.

An Escape From Reality

The ABA Journal is read by half of the nation's 1 million lawyers every month. It covers the trends, people and finances of the legal profession from Wall Street to Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Self Improvement

Why Hollywood loves lawyers

Franz Kafka, the German novelist who wrote the classic ‘Metamorphosis’ unintentionally made famous the word Kafkaesque, which is simply a situation so absurd, ironic and painfully bureaucratic (and unfair at the same time) that it borders on hilarity.

The Meaning Of Kafkaesque

There is a great amount of frustration that goes into any situation that is truly Kafkaesque, like fighting against a system where no matter how hard you pull and push, you will keep sinking deep into the abyss, the swamp which does not care about your interests or even your very existence.
The many examples in the author’s works seem to suggest that bureaucracy does not exist to serve justice or to help anyone, but only to grow its own tentacles.

Bureaucratic Insanity

Problem Solving

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules. We think rules are hampering our freedom and argue that they should be broken.It is not really the rules that are the problem, but the unjustified ones.

Rules

Imagine living in a world without rules. 
<ul>
<li>Language follows rules. Breaking away from the rules of language makes us incoherent.</li>
<li>Consider the rules of sport or games, the rules of chess or football. Without the rules, chess wouldn't be chess. A game without rules is no game at all.</li>
<li>Daily norms tell us what we can and can't do and make our social interactions run smoothly.</li>
<li>Rules about driving on the left or the right, not littering, queueing are the building blocks of a harmonious society.</li>
</ul>

A life without rules

Some people would prefer a society without government, where individual freedom comes first.However, a world that promotes anarchy is inherently unstable. Humans continually make new rules to govern and do so as quickly as old rules are overturned.

Anarchy

Rules aren't just invented by rulers and imposed from the top down. They often arise from the needs of mutually agreeable social and economic interactions.When people collectively have to manage resources such as common land or water, people jointly construct rules to govern the resources.

Spontaneous rule construction

If each of us had to justify each rule from scratch, we would grind to a halt. Because of rules, we are able to learn hugely complex systems of language and social norms without spending too much time.However, rules can develop their own momentum. People can become so passionate about arbitrary rules like dress code or dietary restrictions that they may impost extreme punishments to maintain them.

Arbitrary rules

Some rules keep being added and extended so that our individual liberty is increasingly reduced. Regulations on drug discovery can be so onerous that a potentially valuable medicine is rejected. It is best to always know why you are following a rule.

Rule-creep

"I'm in my late 20s and I'm feeling more and more constrained by rules. From the endless signs that tell me to 'stand on the right' on escalators or 'skateboarding forbidden' in public places to all those unwritten societal rules such as the expectation that I should settle down, buy a house and have a family.

The law is for stupid people

The Meaning Of ‘Kafkaesque’ Is About More Than Just Pointless Bureaucracy And Giant Insects

Why Hollywood loves lawyers

The Meaning Of ‘Kafkaesque’ Is About More Than Just Pointless Bureaucracy And Giant Insects

Could we live in a world without rules?

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