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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35072
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35072
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The virtuous transgressor is one of the oldest and most popular figures in literature. We find them everywhere from Robin Hood to Dirty Harry.

How can a transgressor be virtuous? We all have basically the same attitude towards the law: it should constrain me as little as possible and other people as much as possible, or at least as much as is required to make sure they don't interfere with me and what I want to do.

Naturally, no one set of laws is going provide that for everyone, so the law is a set of compromises. I accept a set of constraints imposed by my neighbours in exchange for them accepting a set of constraints imposed by me. This does not prevent me from campaigning to have the balance of constraints shifted in my favor, which is why politics is eternal. If there were one perfect balance of constraints that all could accept, we would have found it by now. Instead, we have a constant shifting of constraints as people continually work for their own advantage. This process was very much on display this week in the Mark Zuckerberg hearings on Capitol Hill. At stake are the appropriate constraints on the collection and use of personal data. One set of constraints would ruin the Facebook business model. Another could undermine democracy. The struggle continues.

The business of defining constraints falls to the elites. Most elections are contest between two sets of elites. (A good thing, since elites are made up of people who are good at stuff. The odd time a true peoples party gets into power the result is inevitably blood and ruin.) This means that most ordinary people live under a constraint regime that favors the elites. (The calculation of the elites is to make the laws favor them, but not so much that the resentment of the governed flairs into open revolt.)

So where does this leave Joe Q Public? Living under a regime of constraints which he to some extent finds irksome and in which he sees that the rich get richer and, often, get away with murder (both literally and figuratively). Personally, he lacks the courage to rebel or resist. He has too much to lose (the elites have made sure he lives well enough to have something to lose by rebellion). But who is his hero? The virtuous transgressor -- the hero who breaks the laws he, Joe Q, thinks unjust but dare not break.

But his admiration for the virtuous transgressor is not confined to the altruistic transgressor. The virtuous transgressor does not have to be Robin Hood. Indeed, convince yourself of the injustice of the laws (and even just laws seem unjust when they constrain our desires), and transgression itself becomes a virtuous act, regardless of its consequences. We are, after all, selfish creatures at heart, we would like to take what we want without consequences. As the Great Big Sea song says, "I want to be consequence free" ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGp9bnDm0n0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGp9bnDm0n0))

Follow this to its ending and merely the act of successfully living outside the law becomes attractive. Thus Jesse James became a folk hero to people living outside the range in which he robbed amd murdered. I want to be consequence free. Failing that, I want to read about people who do live that way.

Original score: 4