The Origin of the Idea of Natural Rights

My first knee-jerk reaction to your post was "there's no such thing as natural inherent rights". Whatever their source is - theology, philosophical theories, social theories, laws - individual rights have varied greatly throughout history and across the globe from one society to another. However, the simple fact that the existence itself of individual rights is a constant in all societies, even in repressive regimes where rights are used as bait and prizes, made me uneasy about total rejection of the idea of natural inherent rights.

Let's separate the concept itself from its application. The concept of "individual rights" has existed in all societies throughout history, from the special rights of leaders to rights of all citizens through various classifications of rights according to birth, gender, social status, financial situation, and so on. The rights themselves are very different though, from the "divine right of kings" to "govern by the consent of the governed".

I think that the concept of individual rights is an emergent property of human societies, inherent and natural to all human societies. The rights themselves are neither inherent nor natural, being the result of subjective perception of the needs, capabilities, short and long term interests, and other properties of a given society in certain circumstances.

One can argue that humans being nature themselves, subjective perceptions are also natural. Keeping this in mind, we can say that individual rights are natural and inherent, but we can't say that about a specific set of rights, only in a very general sense.

 

The natural instinct to survive has nothing to do with "rights", it's you who is dressing-up instinct as the basis for 'inherent rights'. Survival instincts are the basis of the natural 'law' of the jungle. Get over it.

Until you acknowledge or sensibly refute that point, I cannot address the remainder of your post, because as i said, it's all based on a false premise unless you can prove otherwise, as stated above.

 

Note my underlined.

Unfortunately the individual natural rights delusion is difficult to counter, because it is founded in un-reasoning survival instincts possessed by ALL creatures including humans.

 

How is the observation that BleedingHeadKen's proposed Anarchy (defined as voluntary agreement as the basis for peaceful relations in a community of self-interested, competitive individuals) is delusional....how is that observation mere 'posturing'?

Here it is AGAIN, with thanks to Pisa:

"The concept of individual rights is an emergent property of human societies, inherent and natural to all human societies. The rights themselves are neither inherent nor natural,"

Unfortunately the individual natural rights delusion is difficult to counter, because it is founded in un-reasoning survival instincts possessed by ALL creatures including humans.

Notice how quickly you abandon the issue of where "natural rights come from", and proceed to mere political ideology founded on un-reasoning and un-conscious self-interested survival instincts.

Democratic socialism isn't merely altruistic, and doesn't need to masquerade as such. It does recognizes the achievement of an economy that works for all is perfectly realistic and achievable in this age of AI and IT when the classical economic concept of scarcity has finally been rendered obsolete.

So given you need to identify the error in Pisa' formulation above, I will only address a few points from the remainder of your ideologically-drenched rhetoric.

...and eradicating poverty is perfectly achievable; only your obsolete political and economic ideology is standing in the way. And Kokomojojo still believes sovereign currency-issuing governments can go broke...flat-earth economics par excellence. I rest my case.

.....and that Austrian fool Hayek no less. Inflation is caused by excess demand for resources, not government deficits or money printing per se.

Marx wasn't an arrogant fool; he was confronted with working-class children forced to forgo education and slave in coalmines, as a result of your murderous classical liberal economic philosophy.

You are looking backward. Poverty is entirely unnecessary today, via an economy that works for all, aka democratic socialism.

The youth on the mainland are currently in uproar over the banning of cotton from Xinjiang over trumped up Western charges of "genocide" , and have boycotted Western companies. So now you have most of 1.5 billion people liking their Marxist-based (philosophically at least) government. Hmm.

...you mean the rights of the separatist fools indoctrinated in Western neoliberlaism and who ignore the most basic of rights, namely. freedom FROM entrenched poverty.

Self-respecting human beings? You mean un-reasoning ideologues whose philosophy makes them complicit in the murder of children in never-ending wars. You need as much re-education as the separatist Islamist terrorists in Xinjiang.

"Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe" HG Wells.

Yes remarkably like the photos from the Capitol riots, meanwhile the Chinese are getting on with developing their nation, undivided by blind political hyper-partisanship.

No, you are merely spouting your delusional ideology based on individual "rights".

My job is to educate you, while Chinese netizens are getting on with developing their country.
link
Chinese economy to overtake US 'by 2028' due to Covid - BBC News

 

For some reason you fail or pretend to fail to comprehend that you have already conceded the argument.

YOU AGREED as seen above that the RIGHT TO LIFE is INDIVIDUAL and INTRINSIC to the core human condition as a permanent and inseparable element, quality, or attribute.

That is the real reason that YOU CANT ADDRESS my post. You clearly lost the initiative.

 

I really don’t know what the source of your confusion is about.

I was referring to the contention you made in #244 - prior to Ken’s arrival - that I dispensed with in #247 and described as posturing in #273.

Obviously, people who subscribe to the authoritarian socialist delusion can’t counter the fact that rights and powers are inherent in individuals, not government, whether their attempts be on the theoretical or practical real world level. The spectacular failure of the socialist experiment in the 20th Century and the collapse and extinction of countries that subscribed to the authoritarian socialist delusion bears witness to their failure to counter the ideas and systems of the liberal capitalist (or hybrid capitalist) republics that were based on the recognition of and respect for individual natural rights. That’s why the United States is still alive today and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is nothing more than a failed, discredited and horrifying memory.

To belabor the point, the main reason why the authoritarian socialist delusion has failed everywhere it has been implemented is precisely because it is not based on the two things natural individual rights are based on and consistent and compatible with - human nature and reason - the two things that are referred to as “nature” in natural rights theory and language/terminology. Of course, the irrational nature of the authoritarian socialist delusion and its inconsistency and incompatibility with human nature aren’t the only reasons why it has not and cannot work on a practical real world level - there is also the matter that F.A. Hayek mentioned in the quote I posted earlier - the sad fact that socialists don’t understand economics.

The only person running here is you. I never abandoned and don’t have to abandon the “issue” of where natural rights come from to point out your denial of the abject and spectacular failure of the authoritarian socialist delusion that left over a 100 million people dead, hundreds of millions more impoverished and countless others imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag, Chinese Laogai and other hell holes throughout the socialist/communist world where individual rights were rejected and violated with abandon. “Progressives” (lol) such as yourself have been running from that since the collapse of the communist-socialist world in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it’s so pervasive that the great liberal (in the real sense of the term, not the phony Leftist sense) philosopher Jean-François Revel wrote an entire book on this phenomenon, Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era:

Here is a tasty paradox: How did the Leftist legions regroup after history delivered its fatal blow to the Soviet system? What prompted these elites to believe they could extract lessons from history that blatantly contradict what history plainly says? Simple, argues Jean-Francois Revel: the Left retreated to the impregnable fortress of the utopian ideal. After all, socialism incarnate was always vulnerable to criticism. Utopia, on the other hand, lies by definition beyond reproach. Since there is no longer a vast and flailing embodiment of of their vision, Utopia's haughty champions can again rage boundlessly.

In Last Exit to Utopia, Revel takes aim at socialist apologists who have attempted to erase or invert the obvious conclusions to be drawn from the manifest failure of socialist ideology. He documents how a utopian blindness to facts and consequences has impeded the ability to make sound policy decisions in his homeland of France and other Western democracies. For the ideologues, it's the thought that counts.

Revel later went on to describe the authoritarian socialist delusion in more detail:

Communism differs from direct totalitarianisms in that it has recourse to ideological dissimulation: it is mediatized by Utopia (to use a little Hegelian jargon). A detour by Utopia allows an ideology (and the power system that it purports to legitimize) to proclaim one success after another without interruption, while in reality its results are diametrically opposed to the vaunted agenda. Communism promises abundance and engenders misery; it promises liberty and imposes servitude; it promises equality and ends up with the most inegalitarian of societies, with a nomenklatura class that is privileged to a degree unknown even to feudal societies. It promises respect for human life and then perpetrates mass executions; it promises access to culture for all, only to lay waste to culture; it promises the creation of a "new man" but instead fossilizes him. Yet many believers will persist in accepting the contradictions because Utopia is always located in the future. The intellectual trap of totalitarian ideology "mediatized" by Utopia is therefore much more difficult to foil than that of direct ideology because, to utopian believers, actually occurring events can never prove their ideology false...

And so the denial goes….

Democratic socialism isn’t altruistic at all - it certainly masquerades as such but given the opportunity we know where it all leads - Venezuela.

Except there is no such achievement to be recognized, whether it was in Attlee’s Britain or Chavez’ Venezuela, and nothing about your fantasy about AI and AT magically rendering “the classical economic concept of scarcity” obsolete is realistic, much less perfectly so. Discarding reason and human nature, your ideological ancestors also thought that centralized control, planning and technology could magically turn the world in the Garden of Eden but they would up turning it into Hell instead.

Yes, I know you can’t rebut what I posted, but I have a “need” to respond to someone else’s post - off we go…

Now, that’s rich. Your ideology has left people lacking for basic necessities that mine provides in abundance, and you laughably claim that it is standing in the way of eradicating poverty.



The only thing standing in the way of eradicating poverty is reality.

The Austrian Nobel laureate in Economics, and Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe and Venezuela have proven the hyper-inflationary folly of printing money willy-nilly…

Not only was Marx an arrogant fool, he was a pseudo-intellectual charlatan and a bum.

Eliminating poverty is easier said than done, and your ideological comrades have only made things worse in the effort.

As for democratic socialism, it has never qualified as an economy that works for all, has never eliminated poverty and never will. Clement Attlee and Hugo Chavez have already proven that….

Yeah, and they probably buy the regime’s line that the Uighurs are receiving vocational training in their concentration camps…

LMFAO!! Talk about indoctrinated!

Freedom from entrenched poverty in China?!

There is NO freedom in China…

That’s right, in contrast to the meek and obedient sheep and cattle who serve as the CPC’s livestock.

I meant exactly what I said - The youth of HK who grew up in a free environment and like self-respecting human beings stood up to your beloved communist mafioso as they sought to destroy their freedom.

And so you show your true colors…

LOL - I don’t doubt that at all, comrade….

 

No, I did not agree to that. This is what I agreed to, as succinctly stated by Pisa:

Now over to you to explain how I agreed - in your estimation - that "the RIGHT TO LIFE is INDIVIDUAL and INTRINSIC to the core human condition as a permanent and inseparable element, quality, or attribute".

....when 'rights' are neither inherent or natural, they are creations ("fictions")**** of the human cerebral cortex.

***humans NEED to create 'rights' based in 'justice', BECAUSE they don't exit in nature.

Once again, your error is to conflate and confuse emergent properties of human societies with the delusion of inherent natural individual rights.

You do that because the delusional concept of inherent natural individual "rights" is derived from UNCONSCIOUS survival instincts, not from conscious reasoning in the cerebral cortex.

Now... calm down, and think about what I have written there for a moment. It's not that difficult to grasp, even though your error is based on unconscious processes in your brain; ie, you are free to see that 'justice' and 'rights' are human fictions, NOT part of the predatory natural world whose "freedoms" and instinctive will to survive are in fact what you are you wanting us to emulate.

Time to move on from our current stone age morality ("an eye for an eye") and establish a true international rules-based system fit for an emerging human civilization, characterized by an economy that works for all.

 

Sure no problem

Please note the underlined section above quoting your unequivocal admission of the existence of "inherent" rights.

Little late to backpedal your way out.

 

OK ..pass ..I'm sure we can deal with the issues in this post.

But "rights" (forget about powers for the moment, you are conflating issues there) are NOT inherent in individuals, all that IS inherent in individuals is the instinctive will to survive. See #282 above for the full explanation of this point.

History indeed tells us that the search ("experiments") for a "just" system of government, characterized by an economy that works for all, has been and still is difficult to achieve, largely owing to persistent, obsolete, ideologies of classical economics and classical liberalism, persistent BECAUSE such ideologies are based on unconscious, instinctive self interest.

Looking backwards as usual. Meanwhile China is set to overtake the US economy in 2028...the result of "socialism with Chinese characteristics". Note: if the PBofC really does understand where money comes from (and which you haven't got a clue about), then China will be double the size of the US economy in much less time than anyone expects.

Sadly for you, the concept of natural individual rights are examples of the capacity for delusion via human "reasoning" (as discussed above and in #282), as opposed to correct reasoning to understand reality via the reasoning capacity of the human cerebral cortex). By "human nature" you are in fact referring to unconscious self-interest, though you cannot see that this is what you are referring to. Indeed Hayek falls into the same trap (see below).

Sadly for you, it is Hayek that doesn't understand economics, for reasons explained above.

Addressed above. You cannot explain where 'inherent natural rights come from' and are reduced to merely criticizing (instinctively, self-interestedly) attempts to eradicate economic injustice.

Addressed above. Stop looking at history's failures for the guide to what is possible.

No the failure of the modern Left is a consequence of it having abandoned (not retreated to) its philosophical Marxist (working class) roots, and falling for classical economics theory.

France of course, along with the other southern EU nations which have relinquished their own currencies - is a basket case due to the triumph of obsolete neo-liberal dogma at the ECB.

See:

Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World - Mitchell, William, Fazi, Thomas | 9780745337326 | Amazon.com.au | Books

Since his premise is entirely flawed, his argument will be faulty as well; let's read on.

I didn't have to read far: utopia --- and by inference an economy that works for all... is impossible according to him. But the latter is perfectly achievable. You can't continue to rely on inadequate thinkers like Hayek and Revel.

I already noted government is not a matter of altruism. Good governance is required to implement an economy that works for all, achievable in a democratic socialist system. eg the US with Warren Mosler running the Fed reserve.
Meanwhile if China plays its cards right and makes everyone rich, its citizens will have more freedom than the US with it entrenched poverty, and "right to protest".

see how crippled your vision is? Sad.

Still looking backwards. Sad.

Disproved above; I can always answer anything emanating from your deluded world view.

!.5 billion people lifted out of poverty faster than any nation in history cf with entrenched poverty remaining after 70 years of global hegemony: "You are living in poverty, your neighborhood are like war zones, your schools and hospitals are broken....": Trump, re the US inner-city ghettos.

Sadly for you, your understanding of reality is flawed.

Sadly for you, your understanding of economics is still at the "flat -earth" level...consistent with your delusional view of reality, including "inherent natural rights"

The Nazi ideology was based on self-interested theories of race.

Separatist Uighur Islamist terrorists, like the Taliban (which the US has not been able to defeat in 20 years, despite attempting to bomb them into submission or to dispatch them to Hell) certainly need reeducation** in camps set up for the purpose. No easy feat, but it will certainly prove more successful than the failed US model....

** their delusional ideology is based on religion, not race like the Nazi ideology.

And of course the Jewish fundamentalist terrorist who murdered his own peace-maker Prime Minister Rabin is also in need of re-education to overcome the "chosen people" with their "divine right to the Promised Land" delusion.

Sadly for you, awareness of reality is not indoctrination.

"Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe" ...education which came too late for peace-maker Rabin (who the NT says is "a child of God" (from the Sermon on the Mount).

1.5 billion people experiencing the fastest rise in living standards in world history....watch out!

Pride in their nation is gaining strength daily as their economy grows in strength. That's why a proper international rules based system will come in handy, when China simply needs to raise a middle finger to the US, eg, over Taiwan, to settle the issue....

ROTFL. HK "free" under the British? Yes they became richer under the British - which is what all separatist movements are all about. eg Northern Ireland, Catalonia, Taiwan. But China will soon eclipse them all.

Gosh, you STILL looking backwards at the little red book?....

 

NOW we can (hopefully) nail this down.

I said: "the only "inherent rights" are protecting one's own life."

You failed to grasp the significance of the quotation marks I deliberately inserted around the term "inherent rights". Understand now?

Of course it's not surprising you entirely ignored my post #282 which fully elucidates this very point.

 

FALSIFYING THE EVIDENCE!

That is NOT THE POINT YOU MADE!

Your post was about 15 posts PRIOR to pisas post, in response to ME and REFERENCED DAIRYAIR, NOT PISA.

Please educate yourself on the use of "quotes" and the meaning it conveys.

Sorry, neither 'quotes' nor "quotes" will not save you from yourself.

Thanks for elucidating a perfect first hand example and DEMONSTRATION of corruption and lies we can expect by the guv you are promoting.

Happy landing DDT

 

Thank you for the thoughtful response.

If you have the time and inclination, I'd be interested to hear you clarify or expand upon your thoughts in the final sentence of your post ("we can say that individual rights are natural and inherent, but we can't say that about a specific set of rights, only in a very general sense.").

 

I disagree.

I don't see the concept of individual natural rights as a delusion. Like morality, whose content also changes while the concept itself is a constant, individual rights are rooted in our desires and are sometimes opposed to survival instincts. Survival instinct tells us to kill the neighbor and take his belongings for ourselves, yet morality and respect for the neighbor's individual rights stand in the way. We punish those who yield to their instincts.

The most advanced countries in the world are those where citizens, and even non-citizens, are granted the most individual rights. Such correlation can't be rooted in delusions.

 

For the sake of clarity, I must say that I don't believe in a higher power, my basic premise is that humans are their own masters.

While there's a worldwide consensus that individual rights are important and should be respected, every country, and different groups in the same country, have very different views on what those individual rights should be. Canadians, for instance, can freely enjoy weed, unlike the French. Is the right to legally smoke weed an inherent natural right? Depends on who you ask. Is gay marriage a natural inherent right? Depends on who you ask. Is abortion a natural inherent right? Depends on who you ask.

If we think of the concept of natural rights as an emerging property of human social systems, then all our individual rights are natural, because they're the consequence of our own existence. But the individual rights themselves are the result of subjective perceptions, depending on many factors, and not everyone agrees with everyone else about what our individual rights should be. That's why I said that we can't choose one set of individual rights and claim it's the natural inherent package, stomping in the process on the individual right of the opponents to choose a different set. Trial and error is the best we can do.

 

I'm sure you would like us to forget about powers given that they are often synonymous with rights and completely undermine the assumption that the authoritarian socialist delusion is founded on - that all powers/rights are inherent in government, when in fact any all powers government possesses are inherent in the individual and conferred to government.

To belabor the obvious, Charles Reid correctly pointed out that "Libertas, potestas, faculties, immunitas, dominion, iustitia, interesse and actio can all be in the appropriate circumstances, be translated as right."

Finally, I can't help but be amused at your assertion that the only thing inherent in individuals is their survival instinct, given that there are so many other things inherent in individuals, such as their natural inherent rights/powers.

It's always amusing listening to the votaries of a failed and discredited 19th Century faith (socialism) that is just another relic of Man's dark authoritarian past stand in the rubble of the Berlin Wall and prattle about obsolete ideologies. As I've always stated, introspection is not a "progressive" trait. To reinforce the point, here's a right and correct observation made by the man pictured in my avatar in regards to the photo-socialists ("levelers") of his own day:

“The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.”

Artificial constructs based on utopian fantasies and an abject ignorance of human nature and economics (eg., communism-socialism) have always been and always will be dismal failures. What these schemes are really about, and you revealed this in your serendipitous fit of candor yesterday, is power. Of course, one might also include that they are also about *gasp* self-interest.

The past and the lessons History has to teach us about the catastrophic failure of the socialist experiment during the 20th Century are indeed a problem for the socialist dead-enders who have been attempting to erase that past for the past 30 years.

As for China, while it remains a rights-repressive shithole - an enduring legacy of Maoist communism-socialism - the quasi-liberalization of its economy is responsible for its economic progress. Of course, the rapidity of that success has a lot to do with its rampant intellectual property theft, unfair trade practices and the availability of a large pool of cheap civilian and free prison labor. Furthermore, had the Chinese people never been held at the barrel of a communist gun and been free to embrace free enterprise earlier its economy conceivably could have been larger than that of the U.S. today, instead of running decades behind. For a country with a population four times the size of the United States, it's really a matter of what has taken them so long, and sadly the latest incarnation of its long authoritarian past - communism - is what has retarded China’s progress.

BTW, I am well aware of where money comes from, but more importantly I am aware of where wealth comes from.

Obviously, you are the one in error here, and we've been over this before. Reason and "right reason" have always been considered a conscious function of an individual's mind and morality - not instinct. Ordinarily, I would be astonished that anyone could confuse the two, but I can fully understand the need on the part of the votaries of the authoritarian socialist delusion to fabricate such a ridiculous construct that is so easily refuted.

LOL - Tell us all about your Nobel Prize in Economics. Better yet, tell us over a stack of worthless Venezuelan bolivars.

Spare us your empty posturing about justice, economic or otherwise - you fool no one. As for explanations of where inherent natural rights come from - the individual and reason - I've been over that in this thread more times than I can count. Had you paid attention to what I've been posting, you would also know that government derives its powers from the same place. Government has no inherent powers and rights. No matter how hard the votaries of the authoritarian socialist delusion cling to the past - take note - Man dispensed with that antiquated notion over six centuries ago.

I hear you loud and clear - ignore the Left's mistakes of the past so the Left can repeat them in the future.

There's a word for that: Insanity.

But as we all know, "progressives" are not rational people, and that's why they FAIL over and over and over again....

The failure of the modern Left is simple - the Babeuvian Illiterati don’t understand human nature and economics. That’s why Ludwig von Mises was able to predict the demise of the Soviet Union and its communist-socialist system in his book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis the very same year the USSR was born.

Of course, looking to an imbecile like Marx for guidance didn’t help lol….

France of course, along with the other southern EU nations which have relinquished their own currencies - is a basket case due to the triumph of obsolete neo-liberal dogma at the ECB.

Au contraire. France, as Monsieur Revel illustrates in La grande parade: Essai sur la survie de l’utopie socialiste, is a basket case because it embraced socialism. Of course, Frédéric Bastiat warned that France was headed down the road to ruin in his book Le Loi, published in 1850, but the socialists in that country paid no more attention to him than the socialists in my country paid attention to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s warning that we were flirting with the same dismal fate in the mid-1970s.

Sadly for you, his premise is not flawed, and obviously you can’t refute what he wrote.

You don’t need to be a distinguished and acclaimed philosopher or economist to observe that socialism - what you euphemistically refer to as an “economy that works for all” - doesn’t work. All one has to observe is the repeated failures of socialists of various stripes (communists, National Socialists, democratic socialists, et al) from past to present. It’s one endless parade of socialists falling flat on their faces and dragging their nations, people and economies with them.

For the record, I referred specifically to democratic socialism, not government in general.

Actually, bad governance and economic policy are required to implement socialism. As for China, it has no freedom but it does have entrenched poverty on a mind-boggling scale. As I pointed out earlier, 373 million Chinese live in entrenched poverty, and given the entrenched disadvantage in their hierarchal authoritarian society and government, most of them will remain in poverty. And we haven’t even begun to discuss the demographic time bomb of its One Child policy - tick-tock…

Your lack of achievement is sad. Until you do something about that all that is to be seen are your utopian fantasies.

Only in Attlee’s case are we looking back - the rest of it, from Venezuela’s collapse to why it has collapsed is staring us in the face right now.

You didn’t disprove anything I posted. In fact, you didn’t even make an effort to disprove it - because you and I both know you can’t.

As I acknowledged earlier, widespread illegal intellectual property theft, unfair trade practices and the availability of a large pool of cheap civilian and free prison labor have accelerated the progress that China has seen since it liberalized its economy.

The funny part is that despite all your chest beating over the success of China’s liberalization program you want to do just the opposite in America.

Sadly for you, reality is reality.

Yet, I understand economics better than you and the rest of the Babeuvian Illiterati do, just as I understand that I am exercising several of my inherent natural rights at this very moment, right in your face!

(cont. below)

 

(cont. from above)

It was based on much more than race. I’ll give you a hint - it’s right in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party’s name: Socialism. As Hayek pointed out in Chapter 12 of The Road to Serfdom, “The Socialist Roots of Nazism”:

"It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism [Johann Gottlieb] Fricht, [Johann Karl] Rodbertus and {Fredinand] Lassalle - are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism."

Continuing, quoting National Socialist ideologue Johann Plenge:

The war economy created in Germany in 1914 "is the first realization of a socialist society and its spirit the first active, and not merely demanding, appearance of a socialist spirit. The needs of the war have established the socialist idea in German economic life, and thus the defense of our nation produced for humanity the idea of 1914, the idea of German organization, the people's community (Volksgemeinschaft) of 'national socialism.... Without our really noticing it the whole of our political life in state and industry has risen to a higher stage. State and economic life form a new unity... The feeling of economic responsibility which characterizes the work of the civil servant pervades all private activity." The new German corporative constitution of economic life, which Professor Plenge admits is not yet ripe or complete, "is the highest form of life of the state which has ever been known on earth."

Of course, as Plenge pointed out, German National Socialism was a unique form of socialism quite different from the ones practiced by the likes of Lenin, Mao and Attlee. British historian George Watson best illustrated/articulated this in an article called “Hitler and the Socialist Dream”:

Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism” he once remarked, “as I do not hesitate to admit”. He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that “they had never even read Marx”, implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been “a private Russian affair”, whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun”, adding revealingly that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx…

Hitler’s discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in “the community of the volk”, not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to “convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists”, meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.

That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all, as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.

Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told Wagener, the task was to “find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution”. Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route – a long and needlessly painful route – and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had “averaged downwards”; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves.

http://socialismtoday.info/blog/2018/01/15/hitler-socialist-dream/

As your unseemly fit of authoritarian candor illustrated yesterday, socialists - like their kissing German National Socialist cousins - are fond of concentration camps, and one need not be an Islamist separatist to find yourself in a re-education camp. All one has to do is disagree with them.

Which brings us back to drluggit's observation in Post #9 of this thread:

The rub has always been that some folks fear the rights of others. We see them on these forums today. Freedom for others conflicts with their notion of entitlement. Their desire to oppress others. Their willingness to collectively gather to enforce their tyranny on others.

Sadly for you, your propaganda is a reflection of your own indoctrination.

That’s right - watch out for your intellectual property!!

That warning aside, rising living standards are what one is to expect from the economic liberalization that you praise one moment and demonize the next. Entertaining stuff…

I’m all for an international rules system and the first order of business will be holding China accountable for the 3 million deaths and trillions of dollars of damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic it unleashed on the world.

You’ve got a lot to learn about separatist movements…

Gee, did you lose your job at the Ministry of “Education”, comrade?

 

There are many reasons the Mafia runs protection rackets. That doesn't make it less criminal.

It's clear that you can't answer the question and so resort to ad hominem.

Statism is a religion.

Money isn't wealth. That governments use their devoted followers to force everyone to call their paper "money" doesn't mean that it's a) money, b) the only form of currency and money, or c) unlimited wealth of their own.

If they print unlimited amount of paper and force you to call t money, it is still theft of wealth.

It's not going to run on paper. The nominal value of paper money is zero. So where are they getting the wealth from?

Only because it is a Federal crime to call anything else money and attempt to use it. Only because it's a Federal crime to do banking with any other currency and call it money.
And, you know, Federal "crimes" are backed by the violent police powers of the state. The legions of true believers who obey authority because they believe it is immoral not to.

This is what is called a circular argument.

 

The governement isn't a protection racket, though mainstream economists have convinced us all that governement can't pay for the things we want without increasing taxes or selling bonds to the wealthy.

Stating that "Anarchism" is delusional is fact, not ad hominen.

...speaking of the Anarchist delusion.....

Flat-earth economics. Indeed money isn't wealth. That's why governments - which issue the stuff (via their treasury and CB) are limited by the nation's available resources and productivity NOT money or any particular level of deficit or debt.
And government spending on education, hospitals and infrastructure is NOT theft. Whereas the junk consumer private-profit driven free markets which make people sick ARE theft of the the nation's health and well-being.

Did you listen to Biden's SOTU proposals to create meaningful well-paid US jobs, funded by the government? The only thing missing was how to fund the spending...the mainstream economists will be arguing over that, LOL.

Wealth comes from public education, research, and infrastructure development which form the foundation for private sector activity, (some of which - in "invisible hand" free markets - actually destroys the nation's well-being via profit driven junk consumerism).

Of course, do you want the right to counterfeit your own money?

But didn't you agree money isn't wealth? Oh, you think gold is money....flat earth economics at its worst (I rest my case).

"crimes' in quotation marks.....pass.....and yes, we consent to rule of law to avoid anarchy.

I can certainly understand why you think that, given your Anarchist delusion.

 

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From Wiki:

"Quotation marks may be used to indicate that the meaning of the word or phrase they surround should be taken to be different from (or, at least, a modification of) that typically associated with it, and are often used in this way to express irony. "

I accept your concession on the alternate usage of quotation marks, and ask you once again to deal with the issue at hand, namely:

...the only "inherent rights" are protecting one's own life."

fully elucidated in post #282, and repeated here:

.........

(post #282)

Now over to you to explain how I agreed - in your estimation - that "the RIGHT TO LIFE is INDIVIDUAL and INTRINSIC to the core human condition as a permanent and inseparable element, quality, or attribute".

....when 'rights' are neither inherent or natural, they are creations ("fictions")**** of the human cerebral cortex.

***humans NEED to create 'rights' based in 'justice', BECAUSE they don't exit in nature.

Once again, your error is to conflate and confuse emergent properties of human societies with the delusion of inherent natural individual rights.

You do that because the delusional concept of inherent natural individual "rights" is derived from UNCONSCIOUS survival instincts, not from conscious reasoning in the cerebral cortex.

Now... calm down, and think about what I have written there for a moment. It's not that difficult to grasp, even though your error is based on unconscious processes in your brain; ie, you are free to see that 'justice' and 'rights' are human fictions, NOT part of the predatory natural world whose "freedoms" and instinctive will to survive are in fact what you are you wanting us to emulate.[/QUOTE]

 

In #276 you wrote:

(note my emphases)

I agree with that statement 100%, but it appears we draw different conclusions from it, or interpret it differently.

My interpretation (from a debate with Kokomojojo) is:

... 'rights' are neither inherent or natural, they are creations ("fictions") of the human cerebral cortex, which humans NEED to create BECAUSE 'rights' and 'justice' don't exit in nature.

(my debate with kokomojojo , not you, continues thus):

Once again, your error is to conflate and confuse emergent properties of human societies with the delusion of inherent natural individual rights.

You do that because the delusional concept of inherent natural individual "rights" is derived from UNCONSCIOUS survival instincts, not from conscious reasoning in the cerebral cortex.
..........

Now back to your paragraph above:

Note my underlined. I think our (conscious) desires are often but not always rooted in (unconscious) survival instincts common to ALL creatures, and I place the un-natural (human) concept of "inherent rights" in that same category of desires, which we desire.... because we consciously like the concept of "justice" as opposed to the survival-instinct-based law of the jungle.
Of course conscious desires might sometimes be opposed to survival instincts; yet we will normally only be driven to kill our neighbor - by INSTINCT - if our own survival is at stake.

Why not? Science advanced for centuries, based on the Ptolemaic geocentric delusion.

Meanwhile, I read Global Times.....and agree with their proposition that the active eradication of systemic poverty and systemic disadvantage, while building a "green and beautiful China" - their Marxist vision - is the finest goal for a free people (bearing in mind you need to let the Chinese people themselves say whether they are free or not. A recent Harvard Research poll says they do).

The next 10 years of competition between the US and China should prove very revealing, provided the pro-war faction (in either nation) aren't able to silence those seeking universal sustainable prosperity on planet earth.

 

Just for the record, I don't claim all power/rights are inherent in government: I have already said at least twice that the content of law is "up for grabs" (government can create whatever law is consented to by the community). And of course I completely reject the underlined, because I think there is no such thing as natural inherent individual rights.

I'm afraid you, like kokomojojo, will have to deal with the fundamental point of the debate namely, the origin of natural rights, before I can address your long post which is based on what I think is an erroneous premise. ie you have to show where I am wrong in my contention that the concept of "inherent natural individual rights" is delusional.

You may be interested in my replies to Pisa and kokomojoo above, to sharpen your argument.

 

The confusion arises due to the lack of a proper definition of "natural". I thought I made it clear that the term can be used to describe either objective reality that doesn't include humans, or objective reality including humans and subjective reality. We are nature ourselves, after all.

If we look at nature as objective reality that doesn't include humans, then individual rights are not natural. There aren't individual rights floating around or growing in trees. Individual rights are human constructs, meant to fulfill human desires and needs.

If we look at nature as everything that exists, we are nature ourselves, everything we create exists therefore is nature too. Individual rights are still a human construct, but they're natural because they exist.

I'm starting to think that individual rights are indeed inherent, though not absolute (just like morality), regardless of how we define "natural", because they're the outcome of an inherent emergent property of human societies.

You and Koko conflate "inherent" with "absolute", me thinks. I made the same mistake in my first post in this thread.

I think the matter is far more complex than a simple justice vs. instinct false dichotomy. It's the survival instinct that keeps humans glued together in large groups for both individual protection and gene survival, engendering thus all those emergent properties of human societies whose outcome is proliferation of rules and systems of laws that often challenge the survival instinct. We're still evolving. There's no exterior model for us to learn from or follow, unfortunately, so we have to improvise.

Don't underestimate desires. We are born out of desire.

Nope. Astronomy advanced when the Ptolemaic model was proved wrong.

Unlike you, I've experienced on my own precious person the horrors of the socialist experiment. I grew up in one of the former so-called communist countries. I didn't really understand what I was missing until I finally got out of the Marxist paradise, probably the Chinese don't understand what they are missing either, which might explain the results of the poll (although as far as I know, the poll was taken by a Chinese university associated somehow with Harvard, not by Harvard itself, and I don't trust Chinese state institutions). Anyway, China today is very far from the Marxist vision, the one-party monster is only seeking its own survival, ideology be damned.

US and China are not alone on the planet, there are tons of other factors influencing their relationship.

 

2ND COUNT OF FALSIFYING THE EVIDENCE!!!!!!

STILL PRETENDING TO HAVE REFERENCED PISA in 282 when your post 261 was 15 posts PRIOR to the EXISTENCE of pisas post 276, and IN FACT you are referencing dairyairs post in 237 due your response to my post which which referenced dairyaris post, in 237 as PROVEN by quoting you with the quote function in my previous posts.

Inherent rights are understood at all levels of thought, conscious and unconscious.

You even said 'LAW' of the jungle, proving the right exists in nature, you concede yet a second time and PRETEND you have not!

You further admit its instinctual, which AGAIN PROVES it is INHERENT, unless of course you are prepared to prove man created instinct!

We now have a 3x concession from you!

How many more times do you intend to continue to prove these rights are IN FACT INHERENT and deny they exist or are man-made fictions?

 

Stating that the government isn't a protection racket is delusional. It exists to enrich the ruling class and the rest of the plutocracy. The useful idiots fervently believe, because they are told to believe without question, that without a ruling class there would be utter chaos.

Got it. Thinking outside the narrow and acceptable parameters, free-thinking as it were, is, to you, a mental illness. I will keep that in mind. Statism is like a religion; many fundamentalists see atheism as a mental illness and many statists see anti-statism as a mental illness. It seems like you are in that club.

"The Nation's". So you believe that you are owned by the government, as are we all. Our bodies, our lives, our production is the property of the ruling class to use as they see fit.

Whoever said that spending is theft? Taking wealth that is not theirs, whether by taxation or controlling the money supply and using inflation, is theft. Your appeals to consequences are logical fallacies, so if you imagine yourself to be logical, you would be wrong.

People who claim to speak for everyone else have extremely high egos fueled by a delusion that their values are what everyone else is feeling.

I don't bother with politicians. They are like priests. Their job is to sell their religion and get the flock to part willingly with their money and liberty.

And where is your proof that this is the source of wealth? Your imagination?

No one has the right to counterfeit money, not even the rulers that some people ascribe near God-like powers to do whatever they want.

If money were wealth, the printing press could make us all fabulously rich. You know who believed that? THe utterly delusional Gideon Gono who turned Zimbabwe into a hyperinflationary laughing stock. I think that's what you want for the USA.

Read up on Say's Law. Or is Say also a delusional economist in your fantasy world where the Rulers are Holy and Righteous and the rest of us are sinful creatures utterly without ability if not guided by their Wise & Benevolent Leadership?[/quote]