… But many have contrived since the 1700s to limit human rights as if they were a commodity subject to market distribution based on a contrived social hierarchy of privilege.
Imagine a white person with a friend of color stopping for refreshment at a local establishment. Their server brings them two glasses. One is filled with ice water and given to the white person. The other is empty and given to the friend of color. How strange? They look around at the tables near them. They notice others, all white, all have full glasses. As the server walks away, both customers ask for an explanation. The server explains that this is company policy. They have put limits on water for people of color and leave it up to the customers to figure out what to do.
Obviously, the company policy violates fair distribution of an unlimited resource. Authoritarian leadership should never contrive situations that put customers/citizens into such a divisive situation. Likewise with human rights.
This water example demonstrates the concept of a zero-sum game. One side loses and the other side gains. The sum of shared water remains the same but one customer is left feeling loss while the other is left feeling embarassed.
Contrived limits on water or human rights is divisive and immoral. However, authoritarians insist that human rights are a zero-sum game. If someone gains rights, someone else loses rights. This contrivance is used to divide and distract people from those trying to control them. The zero-sum idea, as applied to human rights, is even a concept imbedded in our legal system:
During Judge Robert Bork’s confirmation hearings in 1987, he sat for five days and answered questions about his constitutional philosophy. One of the questions was whether he agreed that “when ‘a court adds to one person’s constitutional rights, it subtracts from the rights of others,” Bork said yes, describing it as “a matter of plain arithmetic.” Linda Greenhouse, covering the hearings for the New York Times, focused on this “zero-sum” view, describing it as “sharply at variance with the vision put forth by [the judge’s] opponents,” who “spoke of the Constitution in organic rather than arithmetical terms, as a system elastic enough so that adding to the rights of some did not necessarily diminish the rights of others.”
How could Bork be so wrong? How can exercising one’s rights limit those of another? If I speak, as in this post, does that take away another’s right to speak or post to their blog? No! If someone establishes and publishes a new newspaper, does that require the closing of another to keep the number of newspapers constant? No!! If one group wants to assemble does another group have to cancel their assembly? No! If Congress guaranteed the right to vote, does my casting a vote require the nullification of an other vote to keep the total number of votes constant? No!!! Human rights are not a commodity!
A human right either exists or it doesn’t. A right is available to all without limit. A human right cannot be taken away without due process. It is immoral for any of us to decide what rights are available for another. Rights are, like water or air; equally available to all. If I need to take a breath, does someone need to stop breathing? Of course not! Any limitations on human rights contrived by authoritarians seeking to protect and empower a privileged few is immoral.
SCOTUS nominee Bork WAS as wrong as the domestic terrorists who abused their right to assemble by ransacking our Capital building. Guilty also are all right-wing authoritarians who promoted the contrived division that lead to this attempted coup.
Human rights are basically limited by the number of citizens who chose to exercise them. Exercising a human right does not diminish the availability of that right to anyone else. Human rights without contrived limits are critical to maintaining a democratic republic like the United States of America.
Right-wing authoritarians, like Bork, who believe human rights are a zero-sum game, where if one gains rights another loses rights, have arbitrarily limited human rights. This fear is real but unreasonable. Right-wing authoritarians promote this zero-sum contrivance because they believe in an imaginary social hierarchy where everything is a commodity subject to limits and hierarchical privilege. They enforce limitations on rights for those lower in their imaginary, self-protecting and self-empowering hierarchy.
Contriving to limit rights is about control and power over others. It’s about arrogance and imaginary supremacy over others and it’s about maximizing inequality! Most importantly, it’s about destroying our democracy!
A Grand New Deal is now needed to reverse decades of authoritarian driven inequality.
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