Why your country's laws apply to you. A bit absurd but it also makes sense.
A fine illustration
Let's say, for the sake of illustration, that you're an immortal that was born before the age of civilisation. You just appeared in a piece of greenery, you had some basic knowledge with which to survive. You built a shack, you slept in it; you found that there was a blueberry tree beside your shack, you ate from it; you discovered that if you baked one of those two-legged, two-winged flying chickens, it was super tasty, so you ate them.
Years passed, many years, and then came people wearing weird clothes and they built their civilisations around you. Nothing happened for a while. Sometimes they came and you gave them chicken, they gave you onions and that was it. Many more years passed and you saw some changes, new faces after new faces, until someday a BIG YELLOW MACHINE WANTED TO DESTROY YOUR SHACK
OH NO, WHAT DO!
It's called a bulldozer and it's meant to open up a path for a street to be built because you're in the middle of two important things that need to be connected with streets. Now you're in trouble. People with boots and beige clothes run to you, talk to you in a weird language that you can barely understand and speak from the odd visitor who came and went.
They put you in a cage, feed you bad-tasting food for a few days. You're scared and trembling. They take you to a court-house, or a house with lots of people and a man with a face of authority and aggressiveness. They tell you that you are in their territory and that you need to abide by their laws, which they don't really call "their laws" but "the law".
You somehow got yourself in a pretty big mess because these people came, built a territory around you, created laws for it that included every intelligent bipedal that walked and talked, and then somehow managed to make you break them by just existing in the wrong place and in the wrong time.
Do their laws apply to you? Why?
Let's say, also for the purpose of illustration, that you hadn't just "been" there, you had killed someone because, as you read before, two-legged flying chicken were tasty, so why wouldn't two-legged not-flying not-chicken be tasty too?
Now, we as a society wouldn't want a band of lunatics killing our people, even if they call themselves immortals. We have to regulate everything that happens in "our" territory because, well, if we didn't, we'd find ourselves in some pretty awkward circumstances. Anyone not "national" to your territory would basically be able to do whatever they wanted if you didn't limit their actions.
Social contract
There's something we call the social contract. It's implied by the name that both parties need to agree for this contract to exist. But I like to think of it more as "the social assumption". We hold the assumption that everybody around us will act according to our own common sense, and if they don't, we automatically reject them as outsiders, and outsiders in social contract are not the same thing as immigrants.
Outsiders of social contract get the worst of it. Humans get violent, even perhaps murderous, when they see one such outsider. These outsiders are dangerous beings that look like social-contract-signees but really aren't.
The social contract is a set of behaviours that humans have in order to protect themselves from the eventuality of people with different moral principles who may harm them. If you are an outsider in a community, you need to behave according to their "common sense" or they might think that you mean harm to them.
Their laws bind you
If you act in a way they find threatening, they might be violent toward you. If you litter or disrespect what you shouldn't, you could be berated or kicked out of a certain region. If you do something that they find life-threatening, you could even lose your life. If you do something that no foreigner should do, then you will face the wrath of xenophobic discrimination, i.e. you will face the wrath of doing things which you're not authorised to do.
What do people do to trees on the way of street that's being built? They bring them down by any means. If you're not part of the social contract that is meant to protect a community, then you are an outsider, and outsiders are not protected by the social contract. Outsiders are lucky that these humans are merciful enough to send them to cages and not to an early tomb... most of the time...
Laws are some sort of extrapolation, or a complexification, of the social contract. As every person has a different instance of "common sense", and each community has a varying degree of difference, it is hard to come to a consensus of what things should be done and what things shouldn't. This is why in a democracy, people vote for what they think should "be", and the majority decides the status quo by which minorities have to abide.
Read more
If you want to read more about the topic, you can start from this Wikipedia article
a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely because one was unaware of its content
Reminds me of the time some folks allowed their kid to take a dump in public while traveling. I don't think they got fined but social media definitely threw a fit. Social contract that they didn't agree to and probably saw as normal. Dogs can do it, so...... Shrug
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No illusions, solid animal survival
Interesting. I guess people should follow the "when in Rome do as Romans do" premise; best way to avoid violating a law you did not know even existed.
Regarding the idea that the "majority decides the status quo by which minorities have to abide," I think that often times it is actually the opposite. I think that minorities (whether they are average citizens voting-- especially in places where abstention runs high-- or economic power) tend to decide for the majority.
Out of, say, 30 million people, some 19 million get to vote. Out of those 19 million only 30% actually exercise that prerogative and they elect, say a congress of, say, 200 people, who end up making laws that will have to be accepted by all because allegedly it was a decision taken by the majority.
Well, the majority of the voters in that case, which can be a more powerful minority or a minority with a stronger voice. You're right. I didn't look at it that way. Thanks for the observation.
Fairly well put.
Oh yes, and one last point. Thinking that it is reasonable for new people to arrive and put rules on earlier inhabitants, such as in the case of the immortal and the modernized people, is essentially consent of old world conquests. If it is acceptable for newcomers to arrive on the scene and make rules for the original dwellers in an environment, how should a government have right to authority over foreigners? There is a logical conflict there.
Furthermore, the assumption that governments should have authority over individuals because they have power to enforce their will extends to all organizations as well as individuals. If local governments should have authority over the individual, then superpowers such as the USA should have authority over local governments such as Mexico and Canada, because it is more powerful than them, and it would also be fine for France to continue dominating colonized locations that remain weaker than it. Lastly, as long as China has the means, it would be fine for them to dominate the lands, oceans and islands such as Korea, Japan, Mongolia and the Philippines. This thinking also suggests that it was fine for Japanese soldiers in WW2 to rape Chinese women and kill infants with samurai swords, because at that time they had the power to enforce their will.
You are free to feel however you choose. My fundamental point is that power is not righteousness, mightiness is not authorization or justification for dominance. An animalistic human may wish to suggest it is, but civility and rationality are aims of elevating above animalism, so there is no use in animalistic arguments.
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