> So it's true that one level of depth is "enforce the law and unjust laws will be repealed", but the second level is "people prefer to not enforce the law" and "people decide the government" so it's meta-structures that determine outcomes here.

The thing about "people" is that they're us. If we don't want a capricious autocracy then we have to make different choices.

> The CIA Sabotage Manual offers some techniques to introduce stalling and sabotage good organization function but it seems like the opposite is a currently-unsolved problem.

The reason those techniques work is precisely because people pretend to have rule of law while in practice facilitating tyranny and office politics. The sabotage operates by playing into the hypocrisy and demanding that all of the stupid rules people have been ignoring actually be implemented. The way to prevent it is to reform the rules, but that isn't in the interest of the people using vague/unreasonable rules to their own advantage, so actually reforming them encounters resistance and takes time and in the meantime you can keep using them to throw sand in the gears.

Notice how poorly that would work in both a formal authoritarian dictatorship and system with true rule of law. In the dictatorship the dictator does whatever they want and you can't make them do or not do anything by pointing to rules. In a system with rule of law, the rules are already being followed so that stupid/unreasonable rules are reformed as they're encountered and you can't use the massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time.

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_def 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm having a hard time to parse this last part. Care to elaborate?

> In a system with rule of law, the rules are already being followed so that stupid/unreasonable rules are reformed as they're encountered and you can't use the massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time.

	▲	AnthonyMouse a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I'm having a hard time to parse this last part. Care to elaborate? If you actually have rule of law then rules are enforced even if they're stupid, because that's what rule of law is -- no one is above the law. Which in turn causes stupid rules to promptly get fixed because actually enforcing them causes problems and fixing the rules is necessary to make the problems stop getting caused. Whereas if you don't have rule of law and just ignore most of the rules then the bad rules keep accumulating until someone nefarious comes in and decides to start enforcing them, either capriciously as an autocrat or systematically as a saboteur. At which point you have a huge emergency because it's hard to instantly reform the enormous backlog of bad rules that have been accumulating while no one was paying attention to them.
	▲	actionfromafar 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Sounds like a description of Congress "massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time" with its huge bills of assorted hot-patches and root-kits and favors and bribery all baked into one big, beautiful bill.