Circularly self-referential and self-propagating information-processing systems, laws seek certainty by cultivating and generating referential systems which possess no ultimate or external authority, beyond those axiomatic assumptions upon which they are built.
A certain necessity and importance of rectitude might be asserted from within any such hyper-inflating referential space but the ultimate authority that laws assert (or the power they project) is really only validated or justified from within those systems and structures that they themselves construct.
Laws are contingent, not necessary and beyond the fact that there may be more or less Universal principles of reciprocity or protection of the rights of persons or property – there is no external authority or anchor of inviolable truth upon which those laws rest.
The power of law is purely conventional and historical, generally deriving (in our current era) from the fact that most of us will choose the compliant subservience to external power, if only to remove effort and complexity in the maintenance of our own life and sustainable continuity.
Law is not a natural property of the Cosmos and for this reason possesses no moral authority.
Without laws, our social systems may well dissolve into turbulent chaos and warring fiefdoms.
With laws, those warring fiefdoms still exist but they operate at a level of commerce, industry, politics and nation states.
Laws are tautological but so is mathematics, psychology and self – there is no external Archimedean point upon which to anchor certainty.
Daedelus Kite 