This semi-rant has been building for some time, as I’ve wandered around the web and seen all manner of definitions and musings about what rights are and where they come from and how they should be identified, protected, enforced, etc. Fie to all, I say.

Whether we’re considering natural rights, positive rights, negative rights, rights “granted” or affirmed by the state, makes little difference to my mind. If you can come up with a so-called right, there exists some one or some thing that can—and possibly will—smash through what so many of us see as some magical protective barrier. Rights are illusions that seem to be real only to the degree that others’ conceptions of them dovetail with one’s own, and they play along.

This should be self-evident from observing human societies and the natural world. We like to speak magnanimously of a “right to life”, but as the forthcoming Salon interviewee put it (and I’m paraphrasing), “What does a virus know or care about that?”. Does anyone reading this really think that sputtering “I have a right to life!!” will stop a mountain lion attack? Why would it be any different for the [relatively few] genuine human predators amongst us? It’s a nice, magical bubble many of us curl up in, up until we encounter something that penetrates that bubble and scares the shit out of us ... or actually takes our life. Those of us who’ve had a close call, say in a car crash or serious illness, have had that bubble punctured; but I submit that most who recognized the blowout set to work repairing the bubble as best they could. The closeness of death—it’s omnipresent, and right on the other side of this coin we prefer to label “life”—is something very few have the fortitude to acknowledge, much less accept. I know I am not among them.

It is truly a rough and tumble world, then. To make and maintain life, the cost is something else’s life. That reality is at best contorted, confused, or delayed via the stately dance of evolution over the millennia; predator and prey evolve measures and countermeasures to try to load the dice to favor their side, but nothing escapes the game. Nothing.

Probably when humanoids first started aggregating into families and then larger groups, the rough and tumble was still present (and tends to be re-created to some degree wherever a voluntary frontier is forged). I strongly suspect, though, that a few of the bigger-brained specimens realized that some degree of cooperation worked much better than separatism and competition. Collaboration worked even better ... and thus was the concept of society born. To be sure, in the beginning it was almost certainly the anarchistic, voluntaryist community some of us would like to live in today. However, as individuals became comfortable with cooperation and collaboration, they probably began to expect those things. And thus, those who did not deliver were treated harshly—shunning, ejection from the group, and killing became tools for encouraging others in the group to continue playing along. Somewhere in there, probably, the concepts of “rights”, “morals”, “laws”, and “criminals” were developed. These abstract ways of thinking and approaching relationships helped build communities, to further develop society ... all the way “up” to the modern, complex, multi-layered and state-dominated society we find ourselves part of today.

Along with those ideas developed another concept, that of politics. The meaning of that term has been stretched quite a lot over the centuries, but according to my Webster’s New World Dictionary, its root is from the Greek term politikos, which means something like “of the citizen”. [I note that the same term is the root of “police”.] So, politics originated simply as the means by which members of some society figured out how to govern themselves. Once that happened, I imagine it was a very short trip to some individuals conniving to take others’ political power for themselves under the guise of representing them; from there the gallop to today’s nation-state was on.

Part of the ride was the continual feeding of that bubble mythology, which was, after all, the only thing the nascent political class (viz., politicians) could offer: the hollow promise of security. Perhaps partly as a distraction to the omnipresent, unpleasant truth that the state can never deliver on that promise, and mostly out of desire to increase one’s power, the concept of rights expanded and eventually assumed its current bloated, blurry form. Right to life, right to property, right to a job, to water, to food, to equality, to self-defense, the right to not be offended, challenged, criticized, or to suffer the consequences of one’s choices ... they’re all of a piece, that is to say, an idealized representation of a society we would like to live in, but which in reality will never exist. It is an unattainable utopia. So is the pro-freedom creed, whether one calls it the Non-Aggression Principle or Zero Aggression Principle, which states: No human being has the right—under any circumstances—to initiate force against another human being, nor to threaten or delegate its initiation.

Why? Because there are elements of nature—which includes human life—that have a stubborn way of not playing along with the conceptual game.

Life actually works like this: We are all free to do whatever we want. Seriously. We can do whatever we want, within the bounds of the physical world of course. What keeps us from pursuing this total freedom? Two things, I think: the desire most humans have to see ourselves and be seen by others as a good person; and our social nature (of which the first reason is a part).

Because of the deep social needs humans have, we learn very early to check many of our impulses to do whatever we want, because doing them could harm our relationships with others. From infancy, we need attention and care from our caregivers, and through ancient instincts, we act to gain and maintain their approval, and minimize their disapproval. As we mature, social needs expand and change, and are influenced by the society/culture we are raised in, as well as our own thoughts and feelings with respect to its constructs and the individuals around us. It’s at these levels that instinct can be overridden or subverted by conditioning, in many individuals. That conditioning can take the form of family values, cultural biases, religious mores, political principles, and/or state and social indoctrination. Thus, from that elemental need has arisen an approach that does work, but which is largely smothered by irrationality—viz., claiming that not-A is A and building upon that flawed premise. That’s why I emphatically reject the idea that all of human social history thus far represents progress. So, to summarize my view, it is our need to interact positively and collaboratively with others that checks our baser impulses; and this simple thing has become expanded upon and/or codified into the concept of rights, which is ostensibly the fundament of law.

Earlier I mentioned “genuine human predators”. In my view, they are those relative few who do not conform to the ideas of rights to life and property. In other words, their acts signal a rejection of what many conceive of as “natural law”. Part of the reason why individuals like David Berkowitz, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Michael Swango are widely reviled as monsters is because their acts puncture our cozy conceptual bubble. (Statist systems, largely through the believers tasked with “education” and infusing nationalism and defense of the homeland, create both mental and physical predators as well. The fact that many of them have at the least a vague unease about their lives suggests that some element of their being recognizes the lies upon which the life has been built.)

Does my rejection of the concept of “rights”mean I condone or encourage such acts? I would hope that it is clear that I absolutely do not. Beginning well prior to my discovery of the freedom philosophy, I have thought about the conditions necessary for humans to live and try to attain the best within themselves; and my answers have consistently pointed to individualism and voluntaryism, in both theory and practice. I view my rejection of the concept of rights as perhaps an overblown reaction to the idiocies attached to the concept these days; but it is one borne of the understanding that the concept is a fiction. To be sure, it’s a very useful fiction—one that has led to another fiction though, that being the “social contract” that purportedly informs us as to proper interpersonal conduct.

Rejecting the idea of rights helps me keep in mind the reality of the world: there are no guarantees, there is no protection from pain, harm, and ultimately, death. Thus, I have at least a niggling awareness in every situation that my bubble could be burst. This does not mean that I have therefore adopted a fatalistic perspective—those who are regular readers know that is far from the truth. Rather, I try to cut through the trappings of modern-day rights, and focus instead on the essential elements of interacting with others that are most likely to create and sustain the voluntaryist, tolerant community I would like to be part of.

That is easy to lay out: treat others as you yourself would like to be treated. I posit that in a society that consistently operates on that perspective, serial killers and the like will be very few, and will live short lives. Why? Two reasons: the first life-respecting individual who is targeted will probably dispatch him in the attempt; and second, the lifespan of those who associate with others who hold life in low esteem would tend to run to the short side. Even opportunistic thieves, murderers, and those who might aggress in other ways would have very good reason for thinking twice about stooping to such behavior. But there will always be some who do choose such acts. I prefer to keep that in mind, assessing individuals and situations as needed, and acting in accordance with my assessment rather than pinning my hopes on a bubble, and bemoaning a “rights violation”.

In the USSA, what began as a useful mental shortcut for maintaining a healthy community has become a trap. The essential component of the concept of rights has given way to all manner of harmful, fallacious ideas. Instead of fostering a vibrant community of responsible, largely self-disciplined, interdependent individuals, it has spawned entitlement attitudes, victimology, and a wrong-headed zero-sum perspective. To my mind, the complete rejection of the concept of rights allows a return to the heart of the matter. And for those of us who want to live in a psychologically healthy environment, it offers a means of starting to rebuild toward that kind of community.