This reminds me of the tension between the Confucians and the Legalists in ancient Chinese Philosophy; as well as Étienne de La Boétie with his [1] Discourse on

This reminds me of the tension between the Confucians and the Legalists in ancient Chinese Philosophy; as well as Étienne de La Boétie with his [1] Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. The Legalists believed that if you had good laws then the rest would take care of itself. They "advocated government by a system of laws that rigidly prescribed punishments and rewards for specific behaviours. They stressed the direction of all human activity toward the goal of increasing the power of the ruler and the state."[2] But the Confucians, particularly Mencius, pointed out that good men would create the good laws; while bad men would corrupt good laws. The laws were important for the ordering of society but insufficient. i.e. : "The sage-kings of antiquity are a model, but one cannot simply adopt their customs and institutions and expect to govern effectively (4A1). Instead, one must emulate the sage-kings both in terms of outer structures (good laws, wise policies, correct rituals) and in terms of inner motivations (placing ren and yi first). Like Confucius, Mencius places an enormous amount of confidence in the capacity of the ordinary person to respond to an extraordinary ruler, so as to put the world in order." [3] To borrow from the Confucians; the Constitution is a product of good men and good laws to help protect goodness and order in society, but without good men to continue to have a living embodiment of the principles, it is still just a law that can be corrupted or ignored. A beautiful quote from Etienne that you reminded me of is this, where he advocates to simply stop supporting tyrants: "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces." Tyrants only have power because people choose to follow. [1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitude https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servit... [2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Legalism#:~:text=The%20Legalists%20advocated%20government%20by,the%20ruler%20and%20the%20state https://www.britannica.com/topic/Legalism#:~:text=The%20Lega.... [3] https://iep.utm.edu/mencius/ https://iep.utm.edu/mencius/