Editing Openai/6904e1b3-b1d4-8007-b938-da625cb3f2bb (section)

=== Assistant: Got it — we’ll bring in examples that don’t just show simplicity, but cut right into the heart of the contrast. ===
Got it — we’ll bring in examples that don’t just show simplicity, but cut right into the heart of the contrast. Here’s a sharper revision with more striking comparisons:

The Roots of Law

Jesus’s words — “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots” (Matthew 15:13) — cut through the false authority of laws and traditions that serve human vanity more than truth. Rules not grounded in life are like weeds: they choke the soil but bear no fruit.

In antiquity, laws were raw, urgent, and unmistakably tied to survival. In Athens, Solon decreed that families must limit funeral expenses — not out of abstract moralizing, but to prevent the rich from humiliating the poor with displays of grief they could not afford. In Pompeii, bakers were regulated to ensure every citizen had access to bread; ovens and loaves were monitored because food was life itself. Early Roman law forbade burying the dead inside city walls, not as a symbolic gesture, but to protect health and water supplies. These rules were brutal in their clarity: they existed because reality demanded them.

Compare this to our age. A small business owner must wade through thousands of pages of tax code before selling a single loaf of bread. A farmer in Europe might face fines not for poisoning water, but for failing to fill out a subsidy form correctly. Citizens worldwide are bound by privacy regulations like GDPR, rules so abstract that most people do not understand them, yet every website in the world must pretend compliance. These are not protections of life, but convolutions of power — plants not rooted in necessity, but in bureaucracy’s self-preservation.

Where ancient laws drew their strength from immediacy — bread, death, waste, water — modern laws are written in virtual ink, buried in codes and contracts no ordinary person can read. They do not grow from the soil of life but from the machinery of control. They produce not clarity but alienation.

The horizontal society must remember the old truth: laws should spring from the ground of lived reality, transparent and comprehensible to all. Anything else is a weed destined to wither, or worse, to suffocate the garden of life itself.

Would you like me to push this even further by showing how ancient punishments were visible and public (stoning, exile, fines in the marketplace), whereas today punishments are hidden in invisible systems (credit scores, tax audits, blacklists)? That could really sharpen the wound.