Brian D Williams wrote:
>
> From: Charlie Stross <charlie@antipope.org>
>
> >He's not a nihilist; he's simply following the commonest theory of
> >rights on the planet -- one that's used by just about everyone
> >except Americans who've been indoctrinated with their state's
> >peculiar constitutional theory -- which is that rights are
> >negotiated and conditional.
>
> John Locke's "Social Contract", a darn good idea, but we just
> adopted it. I agree with Heinlein, man has no "Natural" rights.
Actually, it was Rousseau who came up with the 'social contract', but
this was not a social contract of trust as I speak of in my article at
exi-freedom, but of socio-economic dependency and debt, which Bakunin
refined to include the individual's debt to the assets created by the
labor of the dead in their lifetimes.
The rest of the world functions on the delusion that 'society' is some
living entity independent of the individual, and ludicrously believes
that the individual cannot survive without 'society' as if he/she were
merely a cell of the 'society' organism. The rest of the world claims
that the individuals rights are granted to it by society, with society's
sufferance, and can be rescinded as 'society' deems necessary. This is
pure fascism, simply put. It is an evolution of the old 'divine right'
principle by which kings reigned over their serfs, where there is only
one true sovereign, the king, who is now represented by the government,
which is presumed to be the thinking organ of the 'society' organism.
It is not surprising that the idea of the sovereign individual is under
assault even here in the US. The last century of immigration by people
infected by socialist memes to the US has created our culture war. The
'Meme War' described by Steven Barnes in "Kaleidoscope Century" exists
here and now. Heinlein never said that man has no natural rights, and
his novel "The Puppetmasters" was an allegory to explain my argument
here. The bug parasites represent the 'society as organism' meme.
Don't buy the con, Brian. Man has natural rights because he has evolved
under the laws of physics and biology to be the creature he/she is.
Natural Rights describe the evolved native capabilities of the human
animal in a state of nature. The human animal survives best when he/she
is free to communicate, associate, wonder and worship, accumulate
property, travel, and hunt and defend themself against agressors. Its
NATURAL.
Nor does this mean that extropy is against natural rights, either.
Evolution is the rule, and evolution is about improvement, optimization
to the environment. As we expand our environment into space and into
cyberspace, it is our potential to evolve to survive in these
environments, and that we have the naturally evolved ability to aid in
our own evolution demonstrates this is our natural right. Those that
oppose extropy oppose natural rights.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:24 MDT