There has to be some basis for people claiming that the laws of the land do not apply to them, but for the life of me, I can’t begin to understand it.
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There is little to understand from false claims. They are just false, there’s no rational in them.
Being a citizens of a nation is your pledge to that nation’s rules. You express the right to have your say by vote, or similar means that are written in the specific country constitution.
If you want to be exception to this, step one is to surrender your citizenship.
Then it’s up to you to try to live in a country while not being a citizen of it. And if expelled, good luck finding a place where citizenship is not a requirement.
Claiming to be above law in any way shape or form, is false statement, unless you give up the citizenship, and move in a place outside jurisdiction of the law you don’t like. Or moving to a place which has no law.
They tend to think that the law works like magic. Say the right words or do things in the exact right way and *POOF* the law does what you want. They do this by mixing various bits of law from various, generally unrelated sources (like trying to apply things in the Magna Carta to US Law), as well as redefining words from their intended meaning by using extra-legal sources for their definitions (i.e. legal dictionaries) to get them to say what they want. The latter is where you get statements like “I’m not driving, I’m travelling!” from.
There’s a little kernel of truth in what they’re saying. But that little sliver of knowledge won’t help them.
The basic idea is that a government is only legitimate if the people agree that the government is legitimate. That much is true.
But they go off the rails when they say that one person or a very small group of people rejecting a governments legitimacy makes it so. It just doesn’t work that way. When most people agree that the government is legitimate, then the government can compel you do something. By force. Police, legal system, prison, etc. If one person rejects the whole thing, it doesn’t matter. If that one person breaks the law, then that one person will go to prison.
There’s one other thing they are right about. If tomorrow, everyone woke up and decided that they were right… everyone… including judges, police officers, prison guards, politicians, etc… if everyone suddenly came around to their way of thinking, then, yes, the government would be illegitimate and fall.
But in practice, that won’t happen in a million years. And in practice, a couple of nut jobs wishing and hoping that the whole thing will fall apart won’t make it happen.
They hear stories or jokes about somebody getting around a law on some kind of technicality. What they don’t realize is that that’s remarkable when it happens *because it’s rare*. Sometimes the stories have been distorted over multiple retellings, too, especially if the person telling the story has an ax to grind.
> There has to be some basis for people claiming that the laws of the land do not apply to them, but for the life of me, I can’t begin to understand it.
Let me pose a similar set of questions: Why do people deny the moon landing? The efficacy of vaccines? The holocaust? Do they have any basis?
Ignorance, arrogance, and perseverance. It applies to basically everyone that subscribes to these ideas. As simple and as strange as it sounds, it really isn’t more complicated than that. If you *convince* yourself that everyone is wrong and that you are indeed right, you become detached from society and no longer care what anyone else thinks.
They don’t seem that different from the cranks you find in other fields. e.g. in physics and maths you get these people with no qualifications who write long papers declaring that they have made some amazing new discovery, but it’s all just incomprehensible gibberish.
For some reason – I don’t know whether it’s necessarily always mental illness, but it often seems to be a factor – sometimes when people come across a complicated subject that they don’t understand, instead of just acknowledging that they don’t understand it, or working to develop the same understanding as everyone else, they convince themselves that they already understand it. They will come across some highly technical discussion, construct some half-baked interpretation of the language in their head, and insist that it’s the correct viewpoint. And I suppose, from their perspective, that’s what everyone else is doing anyway.
When it comes to the law, it doesn’t help that…
* usually when non-lawyers get interested in the law, it’s because they want to get something important (like financial compensation, or avoiding a conviction) and it can be difficult to accept that it might not actually be possible to achieve what they want
* lawyers and judges are often overly fond of jargon and archaic language, making the law harder to understand than it could be
* often there really is “one weird trick”, if you’re influential enough – politicians, judges and major companies can get pretty crafty with writing/interpreting laws/contracts to achieve the outcomes they want, and it can seem like they’re weaving magic with the text when actually they’re just exercising raw power
There’s nothing to understand. Time and time again the argument has been made and time and time again it has been thrown out. It has no basis in law
Sovereign citizens are much more likely to believe in the supernatural. As a result, they believe that they can treat the law as a sort of supernatural force.
If they just say the right incantation, the right words in the right order, and attempt to reason with officers through explorations of ambiguous language, or at the very least passages that can be seen as ambiguous when not accompanied by surrounding context, then they can get out of anything.
They feel as if they can “out-logic” the law in a 4d chess game of intellectual gymnastics by spinning loose justifications that they’re special big deal because they’re smart, libertarian, “know the secret code” because they’re so wise, and are trained in the ancient ways of the arcane art of lawmancy.
Of course, this is nonsense. They’re just entertaining a fantasy in their heads that in all likeliness they saw on a tv show or a film, and thought it was cool, so they adopted it as part of their identity. Because that is what it is, a fantasy. It’s not how *any* of this works.
They usually look for a specific word or phrase that would justify them from being exempt from some sort of law, or twisting it so the laws for them are unconstitutional (in the US).
The most common example I know of is driving rules.. All states have laws saying drivers need a license and cars need to be registered, but they will look at the laws and claim “drivers” and “vehicles” only apply to commercial licenses, and since they aren’t being paid to drive around, they don’t need to do either of these things. That’s obviously false, and driver applies to anyone who operated a motor vehicle on the roads, but it doesn’t stop them.
They believe they have found a technicality or procedural incantation that will render the court system powerless against them. They imagine they’ll essentially maneuver a judge into ruling that our entire system of laws and government is actually wrong. What they fail / refuse to understand is it isn’t their understanding the of the law that matters, but everyone else’s.
The fact that they are in front of the court belies their claim of sovereignty, as if they were sovereign the court wouldn’t have any power over them initially.
They also can’t answer what happens if two of them meet on the street — can one rob / kill the other with impunity?
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