During the Monica Lewinski affair, an independent media outlet called the Salon ran an article about an affair by Bill Clinton's main Congressional prosecutor Henry Hyde. The mainstream media lashed out at Salon, saying that they had violated “unspoken rules.”

The correct response to that is that, if a rule is unspoken, it is not a valid rule and should be violated.

The same is the case with unofficial “rules” of society. If a rule is not honest enough to be official, then it is not honest enough to be followed. Creating unofficial rules is a way to sneak in tyranny into countries that are intended to be free. Which means that it is not only one's right to disobey such attempts at hidden tyranny, but it is one's duty before liberty to do so.

You want your society's rules to be followed, sign them into law. And if you do not have the courage to do so, then do not demand that others follow them.

When I was with an older woman, her daughters told me that I was breaking up their family. I was doing no such thing. I did absolutely nothing to stand between that woman and her daughters. What I was doing instead was loving her and treating her rightfully. They were not used to that. Her previous men had been bad to her. The family consisted of that woman sacrificing herself for her children. They could not handle the idea of her being treated right, and they attacked our relationship.

We see this kind of thing all the time. If you are a man, you don't marry a witch. If you are a woman, you do not marry a Communist. I am neither a witch nor a Communist, but I've known a number of both, and none of them struck me as being worse than anyone else. My grandmother was a Communist, and she had every virtue that is claimed by Western conservatives. As for witches, the ones I have known were intelligent, beautiful and hard-working and in every respect better than people who wanted them burned.

So there are people claiming that there was something fishy about me getting together with my former wife. Excuse me, I sacrificed a very nice situation in America and moved to the other side of the world to be with someone I loved. If this is a violation of some unwritten law, then it is an unwritten law that deserves to be violated. And I hope that more people around the world violate such illegitimate injunctions.

If there is a written law, follow it or work to get it altered. But a rule that is unwritten is an attempt at hidden tyranny. It is an attempt to control people in invisible and untraceable ways. And that constitutes a more insidious form of totalitarianism than anything that actual Communists had put into place.

If a rule is not honest enough to be written, then it is not honest enough to be followed. You want people to follow your rules, sign them into law. Anything else is an attempt at hidden tyranny. And such has no business existing in countries that claim to be free.

Ilya Shambat
https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatthought