The Hand of Law

Law presents itself as a guardian of rights and social peace, but its core function is to preserve the legal order and the interests that dominate it. Rights are recognised only when they stabilise that order; when they challenge the hierarchy that sustains it, they are restricted or quietly ignored. Property is the central unit of protection, not because possessions matter in themselves, but because the distribution of property is the scaffolding of power. A system that defines harm through what endangers property inevitably reinforces those who already own the most.

The billionaire is not a success story but the emblem of a structural failure the law is built to defend. Their fortune is symbolic, yet it extracts real costs felt by everyone else: housing, wages, resources, political decisions bent to serve accumulation. The world is arranged so a handful can insulate themselves from the collapse their extraction accelerates. A symbolic order that treats extreme wealth as virtue reveals its emptiness. A society that lets the few prepare for catastrophe instead of preventing it has already declared its purpose: the preservation of power for its own sake, at the expense of everyone it claims to serve.

What law ultimately protects is the operating system that generates these conditions. We need order, but the system sustains itself by producing the very crises it claims to solve: poverty to justify intervention, disorder to justify control, antitheses to justify power. It manufactures its own oppositions so it can pose as the answer. The same machinery that creates exclusion then applauds itself for containing it. Dysfunction becomes proof of necessity; harm becomes evidence that the system was right all along — a closed loop in which the only thing truly being protected is the logic of power itself.