Surely, you meant "won't" rather than "can't" (unless they lacked an sharp edged tool).
Because creating rules is a means of control. The creators of those rules needn't have that means control themselves. They mean to control those that follow them.
As a lawyer by profession, I am not naturally disposed to viewing 'rules'
per se as the enemy of individual freedom and self-fulfilment - rather I view rules, properly implemented, as the surest defender of these values.
Creating rules
can be a means of control but it can also be the guarantor of liberty and equality, as in a rules-based, liberal democracy.
In such a political regime, the executive powers-that-be and the lawmakers are (at least in theory) bound by the same rules and penalties as the masses, thus helping to solidify civic fairness and impartiality. Even in hunter-gatherer tribal communities, customary law dictated - and to this day dictates among the last remaining tribes - a rigorously enforced code of moral norms that prevented dominance hierarchies from forming:
Inequality: Why egalitarian societies died out
FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn’t always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organised ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others...
Anyone who made a bid for higher status or attempted to take more than their share would be ridiculed or ostracised for their audacity.
Suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution, argues social anthropologist Christopher Boehm. It enhanced cooperation and lowered risk as small, isolated bands of humans spread into new habitats and regions across the world, and was likely crucial to our survival and success.
If those rules were absent, we would have reverted to survival of the fittest and a desperate struggle for resources. So, rules can actually
constrain and
limit the rapaciousness of the powerful, in the 'right' kind of regime.
On the topic of the thread, however, I must admit that it does strike me as somewhat peculiar that Baha'i leaders would consider it a good idea to place themselves outwith the bounds of the sacred laws mandated for ordinary believers (if this is indeed the case, although I suspect that the OP is likely not presenting a thoroughly balanced assessment). It doesn't strike me as a logically coherent model of governance or leadership, nor would it be likely to endear people to the cause.
Religious law has often acted in history as the initiator of the rule of law and limited government.
As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued in his 2011 book,
The Origins of Political Order (chapter 10-11), with reference to the Brahmanic law in India and the canon law of medieval Catholic Europe:
The Origins of Political Order
Right around the time that states were first being formed in India, a fourfold division of social classes emerged known as varnas: Brahmins, who were priests; Kshatriyas, warriors; Vaishyas, merchants; and Sudras, everyone else not in the first three varnas (at that time, mostly peasants). From the standpoint of politics, this was an extremely important development because it separated secular and religious authority.
In China, there were priests and religious officials, like the superintendant of rites who officiated over the court’s numerous ritual observances and the emperor’s ancestral tombs. But they were all employees of the state and strictly subservient to royal authority. The priests had no independent corporate existence, making the Chinese state what would later be labeled “caesaropapist.”
In India, on the other hand, the Brahmins were a separate varna from the Kshatriyas and recognized as having a higher authority than the warriors. The Brahmins did not constitute a corporate group as well organized as the Catholic church in Europe, but they nonetheless enjoyed a comparable degree of moral authority independent of the power of the state. Moreover, the Brahmin varna was regarded as the guardian of the sacred law that existed prior to and independently of political rule.
Kings were thus regarded as subject to law written by others, not simply as the makers of law as in China. Thus in India, as in Europe, there was a germ of something that could be called the rule of law that would limit the power of secular political authority...
Out of these rituals sprang law, customary and oral at first, but eventually written down in law books like the Manava-Dharmasastra, or what the English called the Laws of Manu. Thus law, in the Indian tradition, did not spring from political authority as it did in China; it came from a source independent of and superior to the political ruler. Indeed, the Dharmasastra makes very clear that the king exists to protect the system of the varnas, and not the other way around.24
Even though India does not develop a modern state like China’s in this period, it does create the beginnings of a rule of law that limits the power and authority of the state in a way that has no counterpart in China. India’s persistent inability to concentrate political power in the manner of China is thus clearly rooted in Indian religion...India’s hierarchical, segmented religious and social system made the concentration of political power difficult.
So, a "
well-organized priestly class of Brahmins" constrained "
the ability of states to concentrate power" by ensuring that kings were subject to the law, rather than above it.
See:
Hall – The Reformation Roots of Social Contract
"...M. Stanton Evans points out that the Magna Carta, as a medieval document, was a catalogue of liberties, rights, and safe-guards from statist intrusion. Expressive of the medieval theology of its time, this document was a benchmark of civic liberties and owed its origin to Christianity.
TURNING POINT #3: The Conciliar Movement
The Renaissance witnessed a simultaneous exhibition of the potency of free-trade, as well as of the tendency toward corruption in inferior kings. Both coalesced to support the Reformation era changes in economics and politics. "The thought and practice of the Middle Ages," notes Evans, "thus produced two related concepts limiting the rule of princes: the idea of their implied or explicit contract with their subjects; and the idea of the higher law above the state, represented in the prerogatives of the church. Kings who violated either could be resisted."
The theology of the Middle Ages bore much fruit in the political formulations of the next centuries. Even the early modernists could not escape the influence of the biblical categories maintained in the church fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, and the pre-reformers. Modern developments of the state are difficult to assess, if considered in the abstract or not against the backdrop of medieval and Reformation theologies of the state.
TURNING POINT #4: The Magisterial Reformers (1500-1550)
Medieval sources contained precedents for resistance, but Protestants became especially animated pursuing theological foundations for more democratic expressions. Holl summarized the major effects of Reformation thought as: "on the one hand, a deepening of the theory of the state; on the other, a definite limitations of its powers."...