My Rights
I wrote thise while really stoned. It’s pretty bad. But I’m keeping it up anyways.
I’m very grateful for the rights I get as a citizen. For most of history the state has been brutal and oppressive, and my freedom to speak out against the government or expect a fair justice system is actually highly unusual! I don’t even have to look to the past to be grafetul, there’s two billion people living in autocracies, and 3.5 billion in what’s called “electoral autocracies” where there’s voting but key rights like freedom of association and expression aren’t given. If I was in China, Russia, North Korea, or any one of the innumerable autocratic states my right to exist as a queer person or to speak freely and address the government would not exist. No fair trials, arbitrary detention. This is horrible!
I don’t understand why everyone who’s not an elite in North Korea doesn’t turn to each other and say “Hey, are you thinking what I’m thinking? Let’s unite with the South, fuck this. Being a Colonel in the Army is great but getting rid of the rulers and reuniting with the South is obviously better, if not for me then for my kids.”. And that would be that, because what can a handful of elites do against most of society, and every soldier? I suppose the ruling class could threaten to nuke NK population centres or something, if they retained control of the nuclear forces?
Do they just not know? Am I the equivalent of a communist revolutionary thinking “we’ll hand out leaflets saying ‘hey throw off those capitalist shackles, they can’t stop all of us, utopia awaits, August 10 let’s go!’” and finding myself surprised when nobody shows up to my revolution? No, because communism is some pie in the sky dream to most people that you have to have faith in, but surely it’s common knowledge that Life Is Good In South Korea. Their promised land is right there! And they all know it!
There’s no reason they can’t all independently come to the conclusion that they can’t be stopped if they unite. I guess it’s just one big coordination problem? Local resistance is easily crushed, and it’s hard to get everyone to internalize that “oh, it’s do or die right now, I have to put my life on the line and join the rebellion or be trapped in this hell forever”. The ruling class divides and conquers. Train obedience into humans and teach them to be violent and arm them, and then have their masters become part of the privileged elite that wouldn’t benefit from revolution (have an army). Root out and punish any possible coordination of the citizenry (police force).
Wow looks like I reinvented Rules for Rulers. This all feels very 101, but hey I clearly didn’t understand this before and now I do, so that’s nice.
Anyways the point being, thank fuck the founding fathers decided to write all these great amendments, including nice shit like the Ninth Amendment: “Just because we didn’t explicitly mention it doesn’t mean it’s not a right.”. The Constitution is actually super based. I’m so fucking glad it’s an extreme taboo to be explicitly anti-Constitution. I’m very grateful to Locke, Mill, Rand, Nozick, and all the rest. Without them doing a bunch of hard intellectual work we would all be having a fucking awful time.
And most of all I’m very grateful we all cooperate in this project of making sure that we have a good time and won’t let ourselves be enslaved by the state (like we used to be, during feudalism).