BACKDATING
Something produced after the act is given an earlier date and installed before it as its cause. The war body does it to its own wanting, the con does it to the mark, the institution does it to her file and the tradition did it to her nature, and the law has always known a backdated writing as a forgery.
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A backdated writing carries a date earlier than the day it was made. The law does not treat the date as decoration. Texas, following the Model Penal Code, defines forging to include making a writing so that it purports to have been executed at a time or place or in a numbered sequence other than was in fact the case, Tex. Penal Code § 32.21(a)(1)(A)(ii).
The reason is that an instrument operates from when it says it was made. A deed dated before the sale, an order dated before the act it authorizes, a consent dated before the force: each false date is a false claim about what came first, and what came first is what gets to be the cause.
Backdating is the forgery of priority: something made after the act is dated before it and installed as the reason it happened.
[See THE FORGE / THE FORGERY · METALEPSIS]
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THE TARGET COMES AFTER THE MOTION
The generating function's expansion has no object. It is outward pressure before there is anything to press towards, and it cannot leave the pressure unexplained. So it manufactures a target out of what is available, the scarce thing and the visible other already wanting it, then dates the target back to the beginning and installs it at the front as the reason for the motion.
From inside, a backdated object cannot be told from one that was always there. The creature does not experience herself as pushed. She experiences herself as called, and the calling feels like self-knowledge. The wanting arrives first and the thing wanted is assembled afterwards, and the date on it says the opposite.
[See THE EXPANSION · ATTRACTION · THE COMMODITY · LEADERSHIP]
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THE CON SUPPLIES IT ALREADY DATED
Left to itself the expansion has to do its own backdating. A con does it for the mark.
Before the serpent spoke, the tree stood among every tree of the garden, all of them given. After he spoke, the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise. Nothing in the tree had changed. It had been rendered, and handed to her with the reason she wanted it already attached: ye shall be as gods.
That is the tactic. The operator supplies the target and the account of the wanting together, so that the wanting is dated to her and the rendering is not dated at all. The seeing came after the rendering, and it arrived as her own seeing. When the con is found out, the backdate is what convicts her, because on the record the wanting was hers first.
[See THE APPLE · DID GOD REALLY SAY · BEGUILING]
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THE CONSENT IS DATED BEFORE THE FORCE
Consent is the most valuable thing a configuration can backdate, because consent dated before an act converts the act.
A rule announced after the force turns the force into enforcement. A choice made from a menu someone else wrote is entered as the reason the menu exists. A woman who smiles after what was done to her is read as having agreed to it, and the smile is dated to before.
None of these consents existed when the act was done. Each is produced afterwards, out of what she did next, and installed at the front. The consent comes last and is dated first, and the date is the whole of its work.
[See THE MENU · YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED · ESCALATION · MANUFACTURED CHOICE]
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THE NATURE IS DATED TO THE CREATION
The largest backdate on the record is a nature.
What women are said to be was made, by name, in rooms, on dates: Tertullian at Carthage around 200, Jerome's Latin around 400, the commentaries and the canons and the statutes after them. Then it was dated to the beginning. In 1873 Justice Bradley, concurring in Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130, wrote a rule that kept a woman out of the practice of law and gave it the earliest date available: This is the law of the Creator.
The same move dates the land. Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823), held that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it, and so the arrival of the latecomer was dated before the residence of the people already there, who were recorded as occupants of what they had been living in.
A nature is a rule that has been backdated past the reach of anyone who could be asked when it was made.
[See BRADWELL v. ILLINOIS · NOW IT'S JUST YOUR NATURE · JOHNSON v. M'INTOSH · THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY]
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THE FILE IS DATED BEFORE THE COMPLAINT
The institution backdates in its ordinary instruments.
She reports. After the report a second record begins, and it is about her: tone, collegiality, a deadline, a meeting she was difficult in. By the time anyone asks what caused her removal, the file holds a conduct record that reads as though it had always been accumulating, an independent cause that happens to have been written afterwards.
The reason given for a decision works the same way. It is produced on request, after the fact, from the stock of acceptable reasons, and its office is to make the decision admissible rather than to say what decided it. A reason produced after the decision and filed as its cause is a backdated instrument, whoever signs it.
[See INSTITUTIONAL DARVO · THE UNSTATED CRITERION]
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THE TEST IS THE DATE OF THE PAPER
A forger can write any date on the page. What a forger cannot change is when the paper was made.
So the test is not what the reason says. It is when the reason existed. Ask whether the target, the consent, the nature or the conduct record can be found anywhere before the act it is said to have caused, in a record not produced afterwards. A real cause is there before. A backdated one appears on demand, after the motion, and has to be produced again each time it is challenged.
That last property is the cost tell in this register. A cause that was there does not need upkeep. A cause that must be reissued every time someone asks was written after the fact, however early its date.
[See THE COST TELL · THE CENTRAL SACRAMENT]
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THE OBJECTION THAT HAS TO BE MET
Every explanation is written after the event. History is retrospective, memory is reconstruction, and understanding always arrives later than what it understands. A reading that calls this backdating convicts thought itself.
An account written afterwards is not a backdate. A history says this happened, and then this, and here is how it looks from now. It carries its own date. The backdate is the account that suppresses its date and claims priority: not this is how it looks now, but this was always the reason, this was always the rule, she always wanted it, she agreed before. The distinction is not when the account was written. It is whether it claims to have been there first.
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The serpent did not invent the fruit. He gave it an earlier date than the wanting, and the wanting has been entered as hers ever since.
Every backdate fails one question, and the question is when it was made.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
