Though the Western political class constantly criticizes the “authoritarian” nature of certain nations, one should sweep in front of his own door first, to paraphrase Goethe. Indeed, Western nation-states and international institutions have for years been gnawing at the freedom and rights of both individuals and companies.
Firstly, the exorbitant fiscal and inflationary pressures on
Western populations should never be considered “normal” or “acceptable”; they
are severe violations of property rights in and of themselves. These pressures
alone help to explain the economic stagnation
and political decadence of Western societies. Additionally, previously
unthinkable powers have been given to Western police and security forces, many
of them now permanent. Wikileaks
and others
have revealed the programs of mass-surveillance of entire populations that is practiced
by unaccountable Western intelligence agencies.
Censorship and propaganda is common
practice by governments and mainstream media, not least in Western democracies
where control of public opinion is key. But the violation of rights in the West
took a dramatic turn with the unprecedent and unjustified
confinements of healthy people during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the essentially
mandatory
vaccination policies, and the other political
scandals surrounding these vaccines.
Next on the agenda are further restrictions to freedom of
speech of certain social media platforms. New laws, like the RESTRICT
Act in the USA and the Digital
Services Act (DSA) in Europe, are undemocratically pushed through, ostensibly
to protect the people. However, they allow the Western
oligarchic elite to increase its control over society, to implement its
globalist agenda, and to protect itself from brewing dissent.
Yet, in the near future things are probably going to get far
worse. From the alarming potential control of individual lives through the
planned digital
wallets and CBDCs,
to the grave economic and social consequences
of the “Green deals”: all the alarm bells have been ringing for some time
already.
In view of these severe rights violations and threats of further
violations, much more pushback from the majority at the receiving end might be
expected. True, there are pockets of political disobedience, like the encouraging
farmers’
protests in Europe, but these are fringe movements by people who are
experiencing firsthand the
above-mentioned policies.
There are positive signs of disapproval among the general
population, like a measurable loss of trust in both Western mainstream
media and political
leaders. Yet, there is no massive opposition to these glaring violations of
individual rights. Thus, before asking what conditions are needed for radical
political change in the West, it seems necessary to first look at this indifference.
The Neglect of
Individual Rights
The Western world was able to produce such inspiring texts as
the French Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the US Bill of
Rights, both from 1789. Their purpose was to guarantee the protection of individual
rights and liberty against state coercion. For more than two centuries these
two documents have played a certain role in restraining the most egregious
violations of individual rights by Western governments against their subjects.
It must be noted, however, that these documents have not
only been quite “liberally” interpreted but also violated, even openly, on many
occasions (e.g. forced conscription and confiscatory taxation to name but two).
This is unavoidable when such rights are only protected by the willingness of legislators
and judges to adhere to old parchments, however “sacred” they are often pretended
to be. Considering the relatively poor protection of individual rights that
these documents have in fact provided, it is not surprising that these rights -
in particular the most fundamental one; the right to property – can be so
easily undermined today.
Arguably, this current brazen violation of rights can happen
for several reasons. Firstly, in the prevailing post-modernist culture the
meanings of words are subjective, positivist, and not to be taken very seriously.
This is reflected in the current zeitgeist which considers statist intervention
as not only acceptable, but also a much better means to move society than such “quaint, old principles”. A good example of
this are the draconian measures that are planned to be imposed in order to
fight “climate change”.
Secondly, individual rights are usually just disregarded by
the majority because they are taken for granted. This is the naïve “End of
History” conviction, according to which Western “liberal democracies” are the
pinnacle of mankind’s moral and political development. It is the idea, common
among the goodhearted but politically ignorant, that individual rights no
longer need attention because they have been acquired already, once and for all.
There is thus little recognition today in the West, that the
struggle for liberty never ends. As Benjamin Constant said in a famous
speech to the French assembly in 1819: “In order to benefit from the
liberty that they would like, the people must exercise an active and constant
surveillance of their representatives.” Otherwise, as George Santayana wrote, “unless
all those concerned keep a vigilant eye on the course of public business and
frequently pronounce on its conduct, they will before long awake to the fact
that they have been ignored and enslaved.” Such words of wisdom have never been
absorbed by Western publics.
The Focus on Positive
Rights
The third way in which individual rights are undermined is
when they are interpreted too widely and thus diluted. This happens when rights
are expanded to include not only negative rights, but also positive ones; those
that the state is expected to enforce. This legitimizes both the state’s growth,
as well as its coercive and unjust wealth redistribution, in order to assure
“equality of opportunity”, or worse; “equality of outcome”.
Such thinking permeates Western society today, even in the UN
Declaration of Human Rights, which hails positive “rights” such as the
“right to work”, the “right to equal pay”, or the “right to rest and leisure”.
These are obviously not “rights” in the same sense as the natural right to
property, and their enforcement by the state necessarily violates the property
rights of others. Indeed, as Murray Rothbard wrote in The Ethics of Liberty,
that “the very concept of “rights” is a “negative” one, demarcating the areas
of a person’s action that no man may properly interfere with.”
As Ever, Education in
Liberty
There can be only one result of this multifaceted neglect of
individual rights among the majority in the West: the creeping violation of individual
rights that is so obvious today. If the principles
of natural rights were really taught, instead of the vacuous mantra repeated
ad nauseam that “all men are created equal”, then the nefarious agenda of
control being imposed by the Western ruling minority would be far more readily resisted.
It is worth remembering that the first sentence of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen states that “ignorance, forgetfulness or
contempt for human rights are the only causes of public misfortunes and
government corruption”. Efforts must therefore continue unabated to inform and
educate the public about the principles of freedom and the importance of protecting
negative rights against constant attempts to violate them.
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