Do "RIGHTS" Exist?
An argument against a popular Enlightenment concept.
The Argument
Rights do not exist. We aren't born with them. They aren't given to us by God as God only gives us duties and responsibilities (the only Right you could argue God gives us would be the Free Will to choose to follow Him or reject Him). They are nothing more than a man-made concept that can only be given and enforced by men. Two major reasons why I would argue for why it is important to understand this.
1- It will completely destroy the Woke Mind Virus as it is born from this Enlightenment, Liberal philosophical idea that doesn't draw a clear enough distinction from what is a Right and what isn't. This is why anyone can say that anything is a Right. Also, there is no justification for it as you have to take as axiomatic (self-evident) nor does it tell us that we ought to protect and respect Rights. It just further perpetuates the idea of Relativism.
2- It would require us to focus more on the duties we have as humans instead being self-centered worrying about what we can get out of this world and understand that it is men's duty to be virtuous so we can determine through an ethical lens what Rights should be enforced and which Rights should be rejected. By doing this, ethics would be of far more importance to people and would in turn create better men in our society.
Furthermore, it is better to understand that what we refer to as Rights is essentially just force. Rights, being entitlements absent duty, describes things that are innate to humans (or anything else people decide to attribute them to) that can not be taken away but clearly we take Rights away all the time and some nations refuse to recognize Rights entirely. Instead, it is more accurate to describe them as privileges or force as they require a level of force (enforcement) to secure them. This isn't to say that "Might Makes Right" but rather that might just makes, or might makes Rights as just because you have the force to make something a reality doesn't imply that is ethically right which is why there has to be an underlying ethical system which determines how we ought use this force which inevitably leads us to questioning what system of ethics should we ultimately hold to?
What is a Right?
“America did not invent Human Rights, in a very real sense, Human Rights invented America.”
Jimmy Carter
(What a dork)
When we take a look at the founding of this nation, what is it that we commonly think about? FREEDOM! LIBERTY! Men in powder wigs fighting an unfair monarch who expected them to pay too much taxes on their precious tea! We have been raised to believe that the ideas proposed by the founding fathers of this nation were revolutionary and were the foundation of creating true equality in the world where everyone's voice is represented. However, were these ideas based on reality or that of fiction and an even greater question than that, have they given us good results? That what I am beginning to question.
We constantly hear, from all sides of the political spectrum, that preserving and respecting people's Rights is of the upmost importance, but how many people have taken the time to think deeper about what is this thing that we call a Right? I will grant that the everyday person doesn't generally care about the deeper meaning of the words they use and I can't even blame them. They are worrying about providing for their family, stress from their job, personal relationships and so much more that is constantly weighing on the mind and people want to trust that the meaning of words are simple and don't require much thought. In a perfect world, this is how I would want it to operate but unfortunately, we live in a society that has a multiple worldviews fighting for dominance and propaganda is a useful tool. If you can conflate the meaning of words in a way that tugs the emotional strings of people's hearts then you can practically control their actions.
So what is a Right? The best definition I have heard of a Right would be “an entitlement absent duty" meaning, you are entitled to this Right but you have no duty or obligation to exercise it. Take Gun Rights for example, it is essentially saying that you are entitled to own a firearm but there is no obligation on your part to actually own a firearm but you can if you want to and nobody can stop you from doing this but is this actually the case in reality? In reality, people are prevented from this Right all the time, like criminals and politicians are coming up with new ways of determining what the 2nd Amendment actually means in a way to further restrict our access to certain firearms or firearm accessories. If someone has the capability and the force to stop you from exercising this Right, then how could we even begin to believe we have this Right in the first place. I will explain this in more detail later but for now let me just say that I believe that what we call Rights is better understood as privileges and we are only capable of having these privileges if we have the force to maintain them.
The Problem with Rights
The initial response to most people hearing this argument is usually “Oh so you think people SHOULDN'T HAVE RIGHTS!!!” This is a simple misunderstanding (not to mention a feminized, emotional reaction) of a descriptive IS statement and a prescriptive OUGHT statement. Simply saying that Rights don't exist isn't saying that people shouldn't have them, it is just stating an observation about reality. So what is this reality that I am speaking of? To put it simply, Rights are nothing more than a man-made concept or, a social construct and even if we act as if Rights exist, we must understand that it is men that grant us these Rights and it is men that enforce these Rights and without a coherent ethical sense of duties then we have no way to determine what should be a Right and what shouldn't. We need this more than ever in the current state of our society as everyone seems to have their own idea of what Rights are and are assigning Rights to any absurd thing they can think of. Animal Rights, Black Rights, Gay Rights, Trans Rights, etc. (just don’t talk about White Rights because that is naughty) and how long will it be before inanimate objects start gaining these Rights? What if AI advances to a level where it is hard to tell if it is an artificial intelligence or if it really has a mind of it’s own? Will we then have to argue for Robot Rights? I have seen the movie I, Robot and I am not about stand by and let that scenario play out! lol
It becomes more problematic when we take the words from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. This is essentially the principle idea of what people think of when they refer to these Rights. We need to analyze what is being said with this statement because there are three issues that I can see from it. Before we get into the logical errors let me just point out that it says MEN so anyone trying to defend the Founding Fathers supporting “Woman’s Rights” is a scumbag feminist who needs to cope harder. First, the beginning of the statement is “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is a problem as it is claiming that what they are about to say is an axiomatic position that requires zero justification. We just have to accept that it is true but the problem with axiomatic position is you have to grant yourself yet another axiomatic position that axioms require no justification and if that is the case then we can just slap the title of axiom onto any belief that we hold and they can never be questioned as they are just essential to the epistemic foundation of the worldview. In all truth, there is no position that doesn’t require some sort of justification for the belief so it is impossible for axioms to be a reality and is just pure fiction developed by Enlightenment thinkers to make up for their lack of any epistemic justification.
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Second would be “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. This, in and of itself has two issues that I need to mention. First, it is commonly stated that the founding of this nation was based around Christian ethics but it is no secret that some of the founders were not Christians, they were Deist meaning that they believe in some higher power but not necessarily the Christian God as they reject Divine Revelation so the mention of “Creator” begs the question of which “Creator” they are referring to. From the Christian position, it doesn’t really make sense as our Tradition doesn’t state that we were given any Rights except maybe the Right to choose whether or not to choose to follow Christ but other than that, there is no theological evidence that Christianity teaches us that God gave us what we are considering Rights these days. It is more appropriate to say that He gave us Duties but I will discuss this later on. Next I will just grant that we have these Rights but can we really say that they are unalienable, meaning that they can never be taken away? Clearly Rights are taken away all of the time, whether we are taking them away from criminals when they are proven guilty or whether it is happening in a nation/society that doesn’t recognize these Rights. I guess we could assume they meant it would be immoral for these Rights to be taken away or for a government to refuse to respect them but that just makes the term unalienable to be meaningless, flowery language which avoids the truth that these Rights are only possible if they granted and protected by men.
Third is the few Rights that they list which is “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” which are vague terms that can mean next to nothing without an ethical position. How much sense is it to say that we have a “Right to Life”? If someone decides to take someone’s life would your thought be “They violated their Right!”? No, that would be an absurd thing to say. When someone dies from cancer, is cancer “violating their Right”? Again, that would be an absurd position to hold. It is better to understand, especially from the Christian position, to say that instead of people having a “Right to Life” we instead have a Duty not to take life and to respect it. Next is “Liberty”. Liberty for Liberty sake lacks an ethical framework to suggest what should or should not be considered Liberty. Does Liberty grant someone the Right to walk down main street naked? These days I can imagine some people saying yes to that as long as they are holding a Rainbow Flag but I digress. Also, where does one get the OUGHT that we OUGHT to value Liberty? It is just another useless word that sounds good on paper but immediately falls apart with any pushback which is essentially my same argument for the use of “Pursuit of Happiness”. Why OUGHT we value Happiness and who is to say what pathways to that Happiness is permissible? Who are you to say that Jeffery Dahmer wasn’t justified in pursuing his happiness by eating brain custard? Also, can someone live a healthy, fulfilling life while at the same time being absolutely miserable? If your answer is no I would suggest that you stop coping so hard as this is a logical hypothetical that is completely valid.
The conclusion is that while it might seem what the founders intended with this statement was a way in which to create a thriving society, it ends up leading to logical inconsistencies and just seems to be more assertion from Enlightenment thinkers who were just following the men before them and trying to eliminate the monarchal structure because “it wasn’t fair to everyone!” But I will dive more into the historical background of the Enlightenment for a later post. For now, if we can point out logical errors in a system, then I think it is only appropriate for us to abandon that system as it leaves us living in a delusion.
Duty VS Human Rights
“A person who doesn’t go through tribulations, who doesn’t want to feel any pain, or to suffer hardship, who doesn’t want others to trouble him, or to correct him, but wants an easy life, is out of touch with reality.”
St. Paisios of Mount Athos
While St. Paisios’s quote doesn’t directly refer to Rights, I think it points to the general idea that is behind the concept of Rights. When people are discussing Human Rights, the purpose behind it is generally to make life easier for people and while that may seem, on the surface, like a noble cause but it inevitably causes people to shift their focus on what they SHOULD do to what they CAN do which causes people to dismiss their responsibilities. Almost all discussion surrounding Rights is only arguing for people to be as degenerate as they want to be and is leading to fewer responsibilities being placed on the individual as it is everyone else’s task to respect their “Rights”. But a large majority of these people can’t even provide a justification on why Rights ought to even be respected. Most will just claim that it leads to people seemingly being more “Happy” but that further begs the question as to why one ought to seek Happiness? As I stated in the hypothetically above, it is logically sound that someone could live a healthy, fulfilling life while at the same time being completely miserable. They might say the lack of “Happiness” might lead to the self-deletion of people but that is a fallacious argument as it is appealing to emotion and also, there is no guarantee that people will self-delete if they can’t just do whatever makes them “Happy” nor should we cave to the pressure of emotional terrorism.
A larger problem that has arrived due to the pursuit of “Muh Rights” has to do with Feminism and the Sexual Liberation Movement and the disastrous affects it has afflicted onto society. As more and more women are more concerned about having a meaningless, casual sex life as they claimed to be “empowered” by displaying themselves as nothing more than a sex object (in which simpish men haven fallen prey to this), it has resulted in more women being on birth control and even more women using abortion as a means of birth control. For the sake of not getting into the whole abortion debate here, I will stick to what outcomes this has placed on society. The most devastating result of this is the massive decline in birth rates (current birth rate = 1.6 vs. sustainable birth rate = 2.1), which in the article that I linked shows that women feel there is a higher obligation to be a “Boss Babe” and have some meaningless job (most jobs filled by women are not nation sustaining jobs) than to have kids and raise the next generation. This is probably one of the worst outcomes for our need and desire to prioritize our “Liberty” and our “Happiness” as inevitably, if the birth rate keeps decreasing or even stay consistent with the current rate, the logical conclusion is that there will no longer be humans on this earth to experience this “Liberty” and “Happiness” that we hold so dear to our hearts. How is there not a duty for us to keep the human race going? What happens when there are more old people than young people and the young people are too busy trying to keep society sustained to care for the old people? Seems to me that if we keep heading down this trajectory, it will eventually lead to societal collapse as it currently takes a large amount of people to keep our society functioning and the logical conclusion of people not having kids is that there will be less people in society to keep it going. Hope the future generation like living in caves!
So how has this affected men and their sense of duty? As I implied in the previous paragraph, Feminism and the Sexual Liberation Movement has been a trap that many men have fallen prey to creating today what we know as a SIMP (a man who gives excessive amounts of sympathy and attention to females in the hopes that she might sleep with him. Also can display White Knight behavior, unnecessarily coming to the aid of a woman in hopes of the same outcome.) Men have mistakenly seen the ease of acquiring a sexual partner with no strings attached as a benefit to their life but has ultimately weakened the men in society as they have placed women upon a pedestal to where they will grovel for women’s attention and receive no lasting benefits such as a loving wife who gives you children and can create a stable home environment for you. Instead, with the false idea of egalitarianism, we have created this illusion that women are just a capable as men in society which has led to men and women essentially becoming interchangeable widgets without any real demonstration that this is the case. Men are afraid to point out the fact that it is only due to the work that men provide in society that women can even feel as if the are physically equal to men even to the point where a lot of women feel that “They don’t need NO MAN!” Absurd. Men are essential for the laborious work that keeps modern society up and running like construction, plumbing, electrical work, oil rigs and not to mention the most important aspect, being the enforcement arm of society. This includes police who are needed to keep would be criminals at bay who have no regard for the law and will violate women’s Rights and the military which stands as a force to prevent another nation from invading and taking us over. These are things which we, for some odd reason, have convinced women that they are fully capable of doing but yet in every aspect have had to lower the physical requirements for entry just so they can have the illusion that they are doing the same work. With more and more women determining that they don’t need men in their lives, men are basically giving up on the duties required of them in society since they see no benefit from it. If women are going receive all of the legal advantage in society while claiming to be equal to men, a lot of men are opting out of their role and insisting on just sitting at home everyday just COOMING away (consuming their sexual desires).
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The point that I am trying to get across here is not that women are somehow less than men but it is a biological fact that men are far more physically capable of performing these duties which is why this has been the case for all of human history. The fact that women, and even some men, feel that a women focusing solely on motherhood as being somehow degrading to women because “they are so much more than that” is very discerning as motherhood is probably the most important role for a woman. This isn’t to say that women can’t provide supplementary roles in the workforce but to say that women should be in the workforce, military, and police force at the same rate as men is completely absurd as it leaves no time for women to focus on having a family which should be her highest obligation. This is also to point out that it is men’s duties to be the providers and protectors of society. Even if we grant the concept of Rights, it requires men to be the granters and protectors of these Rights as women are physically incapable of securing their Rights. They will always need to appeal to the men in society to ensure that their Rights are established and protected. Have we ever seen in human history where women have been the sole enforcement arm in society? Only time you will see it is in a Hollywood Feminist propaganda movie where a woman who is 125 pounds is a badass ninja chick who is kicking the crap out of 15, 260 pound brute men! It is just a fantasy and is impossible to see it play out in society so it is time that we let go of these illusions and come back to reality so the world can once again make sense. It will always require force to keep and maintain Rights and that duty will always be at the behest of men.
Don’t even get me started on the fact that there is a possibility that a woman might be the “leader” of this nation! But let us take the issue of “Voting Rights”. What is essentially happening when we decide to vote? For men, this is us trying to sway the way in which our country is operated using a diplomatic method rather than the use of force, through violent aggression. So we are in fact trading force for a vote but if women are incapable of using force in order to change the way in which the nation is ran, what is it that they are exchanging for the vote? They just get the vote just because they exist? Another thing to take into consideration is that every man is required by law to sign up for the draft in order to vote, should women be signing up for this as well? I would argue that it isn’t the place of a woman to be on the front lines of battle but with this dynamic it leads to the situation where women can vote in a lunatic (KACKLING KAMALA) who will start a war that requires the draft and then all men have to go risk their lives because of the errors of women who don’t share in the responsibility. So how can we say that it is a place for a woman to vote if she isn’t capable of exchanging force for a vote nor is she required by law to be drafted? Seems like she is receiving all of the benefit with no underlying responsibility.
How To Determine What We OUGHT Do
With everything that I have stated in this post, probably not as elegantly as I would like lol, the biggest part of my problem with Rights is that we are being told that our nation needs to be ran by “secular ethics” as a way to be “fair”. My question for the secularists and even the religious people who would agree with this is, how does a secularist ground the concept of Rights? Even if we were to say that Rights are a metaphysical aspect of reality, the secular worldview’s entire epistemic foundation is based on their naturalist/physicalist/materialist ideology saying that the metaphysical can’t exist as everything that exists can be found in nature. Where can you find a Right in nature? The truth is you can’t. So if the secularist can’t even justify the concept of a Right, how can we expect them to develop an ethical system around what should or should not be a Right? I mean the entire idea of “secular ethics” is a joke in and of itself. The secularist can’t justify their ethics, it is just a relativistic preference system which is why there is so much chaos and confusion in our nation right now as we are trying to operate within their fairytale system.
(Check out a previous article I wrote about the problem for the atheist/secular worldview below)
Proving God To An Atheist
To be perfectly clear on my position, I believe that atheism is a form of mental retardation. I bet you are going to say that is a mean thing to say. My question to you would be, why is that mean?
At the end of the day, as I said earlier, just because I don’t believe that Rights exist isn’t saying that I think that they shouldn’t exist or even that we can’t act is if they exist. The most important thing that I am trying to make clear is that even if we act as if Rights are real, there has to be a grounded ethical system to determine what should or should not be a Right and above all it shouldn’t take away the importance of our ontological duties which I think leaning on this non-existent ethical system coming from secularists tends to lead us to this predicament that we see ourselves in today. I would argue that Christianity is the only system that can provide us with an objective standard as all other systems, when broken down, just turn out to be relativistic by nature. If we are to treat Rights as if they exist, not only do we need a concrete ethical system to guide these Rights but we need to understand that these Rights are given and protected by men and we need men to care about being virtuous so they can properly determine how to allocate these Rights not just say these are intrinsic to our nature yet fail to provide the detail of what should or should not be a Right or if we should even respect people’s said Rights!
I hope if you made it this point, THE END, that you enjoyed reading this article. Feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you think, especially if there is anything within this article that you disagree with as criticism and push back can only help me to better articulate the argument. Also, be sure to check out the free archive of articles that I have on my Substack and share the Substack with others. Have a great day and God bless!