Your Four Rights

We spend a lot of political energy arguing about people's rights, whether they should have certain rights, and which rights supersede other rights. I think this is all based on a misunderstanding of what a right is. I think what we really argue about is how to protect our own rights while getting others to take care of things for us.

A right is something that is conformable to truth: something that is real. It is a right or moral claim or title, an interest in something. A right is something you can justifiably defend, with any level of force necessary, including lethal force. In any geographical area that isn't a dictatorship, we assume that our rights aren't earned, they're God-given, or just automatically instilled by nature.

Rights are relevant only in relation to others. Each is associated with not being harmed by others in our interactions with them. Hundreds of named rights boil down to these four:

• the right to be alive
• the right to move without restriction (unlike domesticated beings)
• the right to feed, clothe and house ourselves
• the right to engage in activities and thoughts that we find meaningful

In other words, we have the right to life, liberty, property (territory), and the pursuit of happiness. Just like every other life form.

Is this the truth today? Think about it; do you have total freedom to live your life the way you want to, to live however and wherever you choose and to do whatever you want with your time? Or does someone else have the final say? Practically speaking, now, not in terms of New Age principles... how truthfully can you say that tomorrow you can go out with your axe and your spinning wheel and make yourself a life of your own choosing?

You have less freedom than the pioneers, less freedom than the peasants of the French Revolution who stormed the castles and chopped off every elitist head in the country. You have less freedom than even the slaves did in the worst times of the Roman dynasties. Here in "glorious and free" North America, innocent people are killed by hired peace officers and loving families are ripped apart by child protection services. 80% of our life energy is taken from us through innumerable forms of taxation. The brightest (and most obedient) among us tend to launch our adulthood with crippling debt called "student loans" that drives us in desperation to whatever wage slavery we can secure. More than half of us have no retirement savings, despite working for our entire adult lives, raising children, and otherwise being dutiful citizens. Yes, this pisses me off.

All of this happens because, in all civilized societies and in Western civilization especially since the early 1900's, there's been in place a cleverly-crafted system by which we have been convinced to give up our basic rights. Now, instead of focusing our consciousness and identity around our own life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness, it is more normal for people today to think of themselves as citizens, loyal to and taken care of by the government. We see ourselves as legal entities, not as natural beings sovereign over our own personal existence. We see the government as the boss, not the servant. Isn't that what "govern" means, after all? When things get too rough for us, do we walk away or take over the government, or do we write petitions and hold up protest signs? To petition means to request, or supplicate. To petition is to politely and hopefully ask an authority to please grant a benefit or redress a grievance.

When did you forget that you're never under any obligation to have to beg your public servants to grant you your rights? If you know what your rights are, you will not stoop ever again, and that is the aim of this article.

It's clear that there's some kind of obstacle standing between us and the exercise of our rights and freedoms. On the one hand, we know that our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people. We live in a common-law jurisdiction, and this means that we have the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. It says so in our charters and declarations. On the other hand, practically speaking, a majority of us have a very difficult time living lives of our own choosing.

I do not believe this is a problem with understanding what our rights are, but rather where our rights end. Or, rather, where others' rights end. For example,

• does anyone else have a right to choose a leader for you?
• is an 85 year old woman at Buckingham Palace really more important than you?
• how can the unborn child's right to life reconcile with the mother's right to her body?
• where is the line between punishment and defense; how can one person be allowed to punish another person?
• even if you agree that those who can't assert their right still have those rights, what about those who won't assert their rights?

This is where the broad, complex, and very interesting practice of law comes into play. And, with all the confusion around, this is why laywers can charge $700 per hour.

A brief history of your rights

Once upon a time, everyone in the whole world was sovereign, meaning each human being had total control over his or her personal life. Just like wild creatures. God (however God was understood) was the the only authority over anybody. People lived in tribes, communities of up to 120 people or so, in which everyone knew everyone personally and they stayed together pretty much their whole lives. They cared very much about one another. They shared their living and everything else about themselves. The tribe was a unit.

Within a tribal community, each human being was guaranteed cradle-to-grave support from others: total respect for her right to a healthy life, freedom, necessary resources, and pursuit of the individual call of her soul, regardless of her age or attitude. Radical thinkers were crucial to the tribe, because they led the community into the future, and were vital to responding to unprecedented events. The only unacceptable people were those out to destroy the community, and they weren't punished, their behaviour was carefully dealt with. After all, there had to be a reason why one component of an organism would attack the whole organism.

Think of it this way: your nose can stay on your face unconditionally - except if your nose is somehow going to destroy your whole body. Even then, there's a good chance that you and your nose will go down together, because your nose is an important part of you and you would not quite be you without your nose. A tribe is like a family: you don't kill your baby when he violates your right to a good night's sleep.

Food surpluses of the Agricultural Revolutions that took place in many parts of the world over several centuries led to the development of chiefdoms: communities of up to 5,000 people. This is civilized society, and the benefits of food and resource surplus, in addition to leading to large populations, also include rapid technological innovation. This creates a serious problem of cultural instability, because human beings simply cannot have familial or even personal relationships with thousands of other human beings. There is a neurological limit beyond which our brains just put everyone into categories.  For the same neurological reason, human beings cannot function when technological advancement is too rapid.

Blanket decisions had to be made in the name of efficiency. Creativity needed to be channelled, controlled, limited in order to keep technological innovation under control to give all those people time to grasp the basics. Some people had to drag the rocks to make the pyramids. Some people had to become experts at crafting or talking to the gods to keep things okay for the society as a whole. And levels of management had to be introduced for every layer of 100 people, to act as cohesion for the society as a whole. These people acted as administrators to carry out various levels of authority through the system. The chiefdom, unlike the tribe, could not transmit the direct experiences of its shamen, mystics, and vision questers in week-long chats around the fireside. Technology did not allow such slow thinking. Writing took over for direct experience as the spiritual authority for the governors.

And, for stability's sake, radicals had to be stripped out, just like "toxins" have to be stripped out of your body. 

Thus, shared community consciousness is profoundly different between tribal and civilized societies; when there are thousands of strangers all up in your face each day, you begin to get ideas like, "If your nose offends you, cut it off." Why not? There'll be another [insert stereotype here] coming along shortly.

In a tribe, everyone is important, just like every part of your body is important and everyone in your family is important. In a civilization, the only one that's indispensible is the one at the very top, overseeing everything: God. In a tribal society, God is God and you are a direct product of God. In a civilized society, God is not so accessible; there is God-king and son-of-God and those who receive their orders from these God fusions: many authorities between the average Joe and the supreme authority. The Hindus, for example, have hundreds of thousands of demi-gods to guide their billion-plus population.

In fact, in modern times the line between human and divine authority has become so wide and fuzzy that for a couple hundred years we've entertained the idea that there might only be human authority and no God at all.

And so, it came to pass over many generations, that in civilized society, only the king was sovereign and had what we consider to be the full complement of human rights and responsibilities. Everyone else, more or less, was a slave. Everyone else had privileges and duties.

When your rights aren't God-given, it creates a problem. It makes your rights adjustible: open to negotiation. This is how order has been maintained in civilized society for ten thousand years. By agreement. This is how the illusion begins.

You see, when your rights aren't God-given (after all, there might not even be a God), then that means they must be bestowed upon you by human authority. And when this idea enters your conscience, you want nothing more than to make sure you can secure those rights, by hook or by crook. Your basic survival pattern changes to:

• being granted the right to life
• being granted the right to liberty
• being granted the right to property
• being granted the right to pursue happiness

And if you aren't granted these rights by whoever is the authority in your life - for most of us, this means our parents, employers, and spouses - then you feel miserable. You feel guilty if you enjoy these rights without "earning" them. Your consciousness shuts down in order to allow you to reconcile your ongoing compulsion to get these things for free, instead of being a good person. Or, you become a hero, and go around bestowing these rights to others who didn't earn them, in hopes that this will get you some karmic brownie points.

All along, throughout history (meaning, since civilization began), there has been a terrible problem of freemen. Freemen are a threat to stability of civilized society because they sociopathically assume that they have these basic human rights and go about living their lives as though their rights supersede everyone else's, including government agents and even the queen! Freemen are people like Spartacus, who led slaves in battle (and kicked butt; that is so totally not supposed to happen). Freemen are people like the American Indians, who took as many of the hairmouths down with them as they could when their sacred, God-given rights were trampled. Freemen are people like Mahatma Ghandi, who said "I will walk to the sea and harvest my own salt (or die trying) rather than submit to your frivolous tax-grab." Jesus and Buddha were freemen. There have been radical, freemen throughout civilized history, and they have toppled a great many kings. That's why they make people nervous. That's why American emancipation in 1865 led directly to the creation of the Klu Klux Klan. These radicals, asserting their own rights as though they have direct approval from God, are dangerous.

Dangerous to human authority figures, that is.

Whenever resource problems have led to kings squeezing the slaves too hard: such as during the fall of the Roman Empire, the slaves have started to run off and become freemen. Why struggle in a system that doesn't work when you can have your freedom right now? The greater risk from the raw elements of nature is more than justified by the exhilaration of experiencing your own human being-ness. It is an indescribable joy to re-discover who you really are.

Throughout history, there have been many formalizations of human rights legislation within civilized societies to counteract this freeman call of the wild, such as Greek discussions of "natural rights" in Hellenistic philosophy and the many human rights reforms under Islam in the 7th Century. Humanism emerged in the 1500's and 1600's, when a society of millions meant so many levels of management that God became more and more distant as the bestower of our rights. Protestant religions put the king in charge of the bestowing, then democracy of the Age of Enlightenment began a custom of social contract between the rulers and the ruled. The American and French Revolutions, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Hague conventions, the 1949 Geneva conventions, and the 1997 Geneva protocols are all examples of humans trying to figure out which rights to bestow on other humans.

The common-law

The Magna Carta is an English charter originally issued in 1215. It was the the first constitution made by freemen to limit the control of kings and nobility over human beings. The Magna Carta was the most significant early influence on the extensive historical process that led to the rule of constitutional law today, triggering the development of the common law and many constitutional documents, such as the United States Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Magna Carta was originally written because of disagreements amongst Pope Innocent III, King John and the English barons about the rights of the king, and also because these public officials were trying to help themselves to fees from anyone that they encountered. In those times, the king and the pope struggled over which had supreme power over the people. Freemen of the time were really annoyed at getting their rights trampled in the crossfire and being accosted as they went about their business. So the barons and the freemen basically wrote up the Magna Carta requiring the King to renounce certain rights, respect certain legal procedures and accept that his will could be bound by the law. It explicitly protected certain rights of the King's subjects, whether free or fettered — most notably the writ of habeas corpus, allowing appeal against unlawful imprisonment. The Magna Carta also included the right to due process:

No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.—Clause XXIX of the Magna Carta

And they got the king to sign that sucker or else they were going to chop his head off. The pope happily endorsed it later on and things have never been quite the same for supreme human rulers since then.

The Magna Carta means that all human beings are equal and can only be governed if they give consent. This means that one adult can only govern another adult if they have a contract. The only way, since 1215, that anyone in a common-law jurisdiction can be the boss of anyone else, is by agreement. How do you go about giving your consent to be governed when you don't even know that you did so?

By trickery.

Let him who will be deceived, be deceived

A slave is someone who does not have full choice as to his life, liberty, property, or pursuit of happiness. Any human being who cannot exercise any of these rights without the permission of another human being, not because he's incapable but because there is a writ by an "authority" saying he's not allowed to, is a slave. On the whole, civilized people have always been slaves, and most of the time, willingly.

We are willing to accept the illusion instead of doing the hard (and scary) work of coming to terms with our own sovereignty and its attendant freedoms and responsibilities because we achieve a benefit from doing so. It is safer and easier from one moment to the next to stuff our consciousness and be sedated by government handouts and mass entertainment than it is to figure out how to make our living any other way. And there is always the promise that each of us might get to be higher up in the pyramid; the closer you get to the king, the more people are below you over whom you can wield power. It's heady, addictive stuff. Especially when you don't even know how to wipe your own bum because as a child your society thought you were too important to be allowed to do such a thing.

Those who sleep on their rights do so in part because they want to encourage others to sleep on their rights. This allows us to justify ignoring the rights of others. After all, if someone else won't assert herself, you might as well take what she leaves on the table. Living as slaves, siding with the majority, allows us to pretend that we have behind us the force of human authority, which allows us to take away others' rights when they don't do what we want. This system of trickery and illusion allows us to punish people who don't bestow our rights upon us when we beg or connive them into doing so.

The whole thing is bullshit. We never lost our God-given rights and they aren't someone else's to bestow or withhold. We just lost our willingness to connect with God... or at least with our own consciences.

The common law, strengthened now with centuries of human rights activism and treatises, says that every human being is equal to every other human being and that none of us has the right to take away anyone else's right to life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. Nobody is allowed to harm anyone else. That is the central law that we all must follow.

Except you have the right to give up something in exchange for a benefit.

The only lawful way that one human being can have more rights than another is by contractual agreement. When I need something that I can't procure by myself, I ask someone else to go extra, go over and above their basic effort, to help me out. In exchange, I do for them something to make up that extra. When one person is dependent upon another to secure her basic rights, then the rights of the one taking care of her supersede. Otherwise, those with greater ability would be forced to give away all their life energy to those with lesser ability. It's one of those hard facts of life.

For example:

• A young, healthy, powerful lion's right to life supersedes the right to life of an old, weak, lame gazelle
• A working mother living with her children who receives no child support payments from her children's father has a greater right to parent those children than their father does
• An abusive, alcoholic grandmother living with her grown children has no right to make household decisions
• A baby's right to personal freedom is less than his parents' right to personal freedom
• An embryo's right to life is less than her mother's right to life, and both have greater right to liberty than others around them who might have an opinion.

This is the hard part about the common law. We own all of our rights, even if it means someone else has to lose theirs. When it comes to survival, it is as basic as this. Our life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness are more important to us than any external agreement. To this day, tribal people will overwhelmingly choose to go down with the tribe rather than give their existence over to civilized enslavement. Freemen are people who skip out of civilized enslavement.

The creation of the today's enslaving illusion

Today we are no longer ruled by kings or even by democratically-elected rulers. Elizabeth Windsor of Buckingham Palace has no more right to life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness than you do. But the story that our modern civilization is "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is also not true. Or, if it is, I don't know which people those are and I'll tell you, they aren't me.

Most of us are taught that we live a fortunate existence in which each of us is free and that our interests are taken care of by the system, and that we are controlling this process. America has been bombing the snot out of innocent human beings on the other side of the planet for decades just to protect our freedom and democracy. It must be real.

Well, it's not. It's an illusion. The truth is that the monetary system under which all civilized people must labour is government of the people, by the corporations, for the banks.

The Rothschilds' influence to create the private Bank of England over several political maneuvers in the mid-1800's, in combination with the usurious new practice of creating private, for-profit corporations, got the illusion started.

The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests. -Nathan Rothschild to their New York agents introducing their banking method into America

This scheme was so profitable was so successfully carried off and planted the green-eyed monster so deeply into the collective Western psyche, that the same system was immediately exported to America. Yes, there was opposition from some of the leaders of the new nations, which had, after all, been created on the common law principal that all men (and eventually, all human beings) are created equal. However, in time - and with a few financial panics orchestrated to scare the crap out of businessmen all over North America, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was convinced, though not blindly:

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men ... [W]e have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men. -Woodrow Wilson's The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People, 1913

The Federal Reserve System is the private banking system of North America, created in 1913 with the enactment of the American Federal Reserve Act. After a terrifying war, a period of luxurious excess (the Roaring Twenties) and then dismal economic depression, all orchestrated by those who controlled this newly-devised money system, in 1935 the Bank of Canada Act created the 13th privately-owned component of this private banking cartel.

Don't let the names fool you. Someone told me recently that McDonald's gets to call their hamburgers "all-beef patties" because "AllBeef" is the brand name of the company that provides the burgers. It has nothing to do with the content of the burgers. I'm too lazy to check the references on this, but I have seen this Orwellian switcheroo everywhere. Likewise, the Bank of England, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and the Bank of Canada are not government-owned banks. They are privately owned, for-profit corporations.

There was a conscious purpose behind all of this. That purpose was to create an illusion of freedom, within a safe, rights-protecting government system of the people, by the people and for the people. But it wasn't so. It was actually based on contracts made between the strong (bankers who controlled the money supply) and the weak (the people who had grown dependent on money for their basic survival):

[Very] soon, every American will be required to register their biological property in a National system designed to keep track of the people and that will operate under the ancient system of pledging. By such methodology, we can compel people to submit to our agenda, which will affect our security as a chargeback for our fiat paper currency. Every American will be forced to register or suffer not being able to work and earn a living. They will be our chattel, and we will hold the security interest over them forever, by operation of the law merchant under the scheme of secured transactions. Americans, by unknowingly or unwittingly delivering the bills of lading to us will be rendered bankrupt and insolvent, forever to remain economic slaves through taxation, secured by their pledges. They will be stripped of their rights and given a commercial value designed to make us a profit and they will be non the wiser, for not one man in a million could ever figure our plans and, if by accident one or two would figure it out, we have in our arsenal plausible deniability. After all, this is the only logical way to fund government, by floating liens and debt to the registrants in the form of benefits and privileges. This will inevitably reap to us huge profits beyond our wildest expectations and leave every American a contributor or to this fraud which we will call “Social Insurance.” Without realizing it, every American will insure us for any loss we may incur and in this manner; every American will unknowingly be our servant, however begrudgingly. The people will become helpless and without any hope for their redemption and, we will employ the high office of the President of our dummy corporation to foment this plot against America.” - Colonel Edward Mandel House to Woodrow Wilson in private discussion about formation of the Federal Reserve banking system, 1912

The Canadian prime minister, like U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, knew that, by allowing themselves to become subject to the private banks' supervision, the people would be giving up their rights out of greedy opportunism. However, the great Depression, begun in the fall of 1929, was still rampant. This was a worldwide crisis that touched all Western nations, no matter what their political regimes or parties in office. In Canada, it was because of this crisis that the electors replaced the Liberals by the Conservatives in the 1930 elections. When people are discontent, they change the party in office. Unfortunately, the parties are all run by the same banking cartel:

Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes that nation's laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile. -William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1935

Our political efforts are proof positive that we are operating under an illusion about what our rights are and how to go about procuring for ourselves life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

You were born free, you live free, and you will die free

We still live in a common-law jurisdiction and that means we are still equal and we still each have the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. But most of us do not assert these rights, because we have been operating for three generations under the illusion that these things are being taken care of for us. We give up our rights in the way that a helpless child gives up its rights in obedience to parental authority.

But the responsibility will always lie with the individual. You do not have the power or right to choose for others, and you cannot expect others to give up their power and right for your benefit. What this all adds up to is that each of us has the responsibility to assert our rights in order to show others that they have rights. It's pretty simple; your rights end where another's begin. The most honourable thing you can do for yourself and for the rest of the world is to vigorously claim your rights, even when that means giving up the benefits of being taken care of like a child.

There's something very scary about the notion of real freedom when we first hear about it, most of us having learned from infancy to put safety above sovereignty at all times. We don't know exactly what to be afraid of, but there is something sinister there. As President Wilson noted:

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. -Woodrow Wilson, 1913

As Mr. Wilson also noted, however, there isn't anything really there, behind the wizard's curtain:

The great malady of public life is cowardice. Most men are not untrue, but they are afraid. Most of the errors of public life, if my observation is to be trusted, come not because men are morally bad, but because they are afraid of somebody. God knows why they should be: it is generally shadows they are afraid of. -Woodrow Wilson, 1913

Thankfully, global civilization has hit its resource limit and has begun to crumble. Remember, this whole 10,000-year illusion has been fueled by food surpluses. That has come to an end and our food supply is beginning to shrink. Governments will topple as we discover the emperors are naked as babes. And don't even know how to wipe their own bums.

The choice you have to make is only this: do you assert your right to be you, whatever that is, or do you look to another human being to tell you who you can be?

May you live all the days of your life.

3:23:25 Google Video - Your Human Rights and the Illusion