Call for a Moratorium on the Suit
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A law that invariably and by its very design fails to attain its ends is unjust and incommensurably more deplorable than the crime it is intended to punish. The penal procedure colloquially known as ‘the Suit’ has so far never engendered the specific death by drowning that it prescribes. The Suit is therefore an unjust penal procedure.
Although the Suit is a punitive measure against misers, nothing could be further from our lawmakers’ mind than the intention to inflict pain. As fire teaches caution by hurting those who touch it, so the pain that our laws inflict has, or should have, a pedagogical function. Neither fire nor laws can teach without hurting those whom they must educate, but the pain that fire and laws cause is simply a regrettable but unavoidable side effect of the learning process.
Misers are deluded and their delusion must be eradicated. Misers see their wealth as a part of their body, so that any diminution of wealth is to them a corporeal diminution. Misers are under the misconception that their wealth extends their life beyond its natural limit, that is to say, that more wealth equals more life. Misers do not know where real possession stops. The lawmakers who drafted the Suit did so as a means to cure misers of their delusion by teaching a lesson not to the fickle mind but to the body. For the mind easily forgets and distorts, while the body is thoroughly retentive and true.
However, typically and unfortunately, our lawyers are theoretical ethicists who are accustomed exclusively to engaging in thought experiments and who have little knowledge of and no interest in the workings of the body and the body’s breaking points. Solely concerned as they are with the formal beauty of the laws they draft, lawyers are typically oblivious to the messy – and to them prosaic – question of what a human body can take before it suffers total collapse. Consequently, the application of their laws most often falls short of the ideal to which these lawyers aspire.
Misers are incarcerated in a penal colony by the sea and are forced to dive for pearls naked and with no scuba tanks. At first, misers are unable to hold their breath for long or to descend to great depths, and only after a long and rigorous training do they develop the aerobic strength and lung capacity necessary to reach the pearl oysters lying on the seabed. Misers who have mastered the art of pearl diving can make up to one hundred dives per day, although the chances of finding an oyster containing a pearl are one in ten thousand.
Misers must swallow their pearls either dry or with seawater. Dry swallowing, however, is not recommended, as it can cause choking. Aside from the unpleasantness of having to drink salty water, the vast majority of misers find swallowing pearls as easy as swallowing a pill. Once a swallowed pearl is defecated, misers must place it in a colander and wash it in the sea. Then the pearls must be polished. Misers polish their pearls in between dives in order to prepare them for drilling.
Since very few misers would live long enough to master the precision skills required for pearl drilling, this task is outsourced to a neighbouring colony which houses the preadolescent offspring of those who are being cured of their various delusions. Most of these children easily and quickly acquire the motor skills required for pearl drilling. When these children reach puberty, they are no longer the charge of the State, but many opt to train as penal colony officers.
When the drilled pearls return to the misers’ colony, they are stitched on the misers’ skin – hence the colloquial appellation ‘the Making of the Suit’, which was soon shortened to ‘the Suit’. Being performed without anaesthetics, this operation is as painful as it is delicate, and to ensure that misers remain perfectly still during stitching, they are strapped tightly onto wooden benches equipped with adjustable buckles. Stitchers are chosen from among the highest-ranking officers. Stitchers must be both nimble-fingered and understand that the physical suffering caused by their stitching is only an incidental concomitant of the lesson they have been called upon to impart.
It is lamentable that this elegant sequence of pearl diving, defecating, polishing, drilling and stitching should be spoilt by the unavoidable use of torture. Without a deterrent, misers would never find any pearls, so as to avoid the stitching. Therefore, at the end of each day, any miser who has failed to find any pearls must be tortured. The greater the number of no-pearl-days, the more severe the torture, in a progression that stretches from the relative clemency of waterboarding to a practice that approximates death by a thousand cuts.
The lawmakers who formulated the Suit did not foresee that the practice of pearl stitching would necessitate the use of torture. The need for torture only became apparent to officers in the day-to-day running of the colony. But torture is a correction that is justifiable on merely secondary pragmatic grounds and that does not jeopardise the harmony between form and pedagogical function that the lawmakers sought to establish with the Suit.
The Suit does however possess a shortcoming that is not merely secondary but rather procedural and that therefore jeopardises the harmony between its form and its pedagogical function, because as a direct consequence of this shortcoming, the Suit invariably fails to attain its end. Our lawmakers prognosticated that every miser would be ‘fitted with a complete pearly suit’ and that the weight of the suit would ‘burden the miser to such an extent that they drown under the weight of their riches’. But the reality is that, no matter how caringly stitchers perform their task, all misers die of sepsis, not, as the lawmakers beautifully envisaged, by being dragged to the bottom of the sea, but writhing on land, like poisoned vermin or petty thieves.
WE THEREFORE CALL FOR A MORATORIUM ON THE SUIT.
Perhaps our lawmakers believed that the sea’s high salinity would minimise the risk of stitching wounds becoming infected. To a certain degree, the lawmakers were correct: salt is a natural cauteriser. But the making of a miser’s pearly suit entails such constant puncturing of the skin and produces such a great quantity of wounds – which, though admittedly very small and superficial, are so tightly packed together as to effectively become one single great wound – that not even the use of the strongest antibiotics, let alone salt, could stave off infection.
But speculations regarding more or less plausible beliefs and intentions that lawmakers did not see fit to set down in writing are beyond the remit of the present appeal for a moratorium on the Suit. The cogency of this appeal rests solely on the incontrovertible fact that misers die of sepsis and do not, as they ought to, drown. Nor is it within the scope of this appeal to propose solutions. It has been suggested that if this call for a moratorium is successful and the procedure of stitching is therefore suspended, the torturing measures that are already in use could, as an interim solution, be adapted to perform, albeit imperfectly, the original pedagogical function of the Suit. Again, the present appeal makes no pronouncement on what should replace, temporarily or permanently, the Suit, as these eventual decisions belong exclusively to lawmakers. For only our lawmakers possess the indispensable legislative competence and aesthetic sensitivity required to devise procedures that will force misers’ bodies to learn the lesson their minds would not.