Theoretical analysis uncovers mechanisms of regulatory capture and institutional domination, highlighting why positive law requires external constraints against power.
THE JUNGLE PROTOCOL is Book Two of The Architect’s Protocol and moves the series from the crisis of truth into the architecture of power. Its central problem is not that law is useless, but that legality alone cannot guarantee justice. If law is generated, interpreted or enforced by institutions vulnerable to capture, then a society still requires a standard by which the law-maker and the law itself may be judged. The book examines “might is right” as a recurring philosophical temptation rather than a crude slogan. It appears whenever descriptive facts about survival, security, sovereignty, efficiency or victory are converted into moral permission. From there the audit follows power into captured statutes, regulatory capture, dependency, resource competition, tyranny, empire and the institutional language that can normalize domination while retaining a respectable procedural surface. This dossier places the argument in conversation with Hobbes, legal positivism, natural-law traditions, political realism, Hannah Arendt’s work on domination, and modern theories of legitimacy and justice. It explicitly rejects the inference from biological evolution to moral permission and distinguishes higher law from clerical or theocratic capture. The bounded conclusion is that positive law is indispensable but insufficient as its own final judge: power requires constraints that cannot be rewritten merely by the actor being constrained.
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Syed Shahzad (2026) studied this question.
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