This passage from Jason Lowery's work encapsulates his argument that law-based societies are inherently fragile due to their reliance on trust. He suggests that the difficulty in achieving consensus on moral and legal standards, combined with the potential for corruption and external pressures, leads to systemic vulnerabilities. His perspective aligns with "his broader thesis in #Softwar, where he explores how physical power projection (such as #Bitcoin's #proof-of-work) could provide a more resilient foundation for societal organization.
"It’s not easy to get a large population to come to consensus about what “right” means, much less what the “right” ruling is, or the “right” rule of law is. It’s even more difficult to expect large populations of people to trust their lawmakers not to abuse the abstract power and control authority given to them by the existing rule of law. It's perhaps even more difficult to trust people both inside and outside a given nation to sympathize with a nation’s laws. History is full of breaches of the enormous amount of trust that’s required to make law-based societies function properly. The incontrovertible truth of the matter is that law-based societies break down because they are systemically vulnerable to corruption and invasion."