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Notes -
Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.
The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.
A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.
B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.
C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.
But...
A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore
B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...
C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.
This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.
The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.
The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.
A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.
Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.
Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?
I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.
There is only one natural right in man, and that is the ability to do violence.
All other rights spring from this basic fact. We have social and political rights because someone in history stuck a bayonet in someone else who was trying to deny those. Any right not backed by violence will wither and disappear in short order.
The last argument of kings is the final right of every man.
Well, of course. It is implicit.
But bringing up this fact ignores the past thousand years of political development, namely, that we live in the era that states have monopolies on force. It brings to mind the sort of self-representing lawsuit maker who smugly brings up the Magna Carta at his trial for tax evasion. Yes, we understand the principle, but it's not very useful for our purposes.
Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder. And through this lense we extend this sense of self to the material (private property) and the abstract (autonomy of action.) Unless you are so radical that you say you have the right to kill anyone you please.
Which, of course, is fine. But then I'd have to report you for strange notions.
No, we don't. From Prigozhin to Weaver to Rittenhouse, our modern states have long lost (if they ever had) any sort of monopoly on violence.
Obviously I disagree. All rights can be misused, but the right is underlying, ineradicable. A right means nothing if it is only the right to do something in a manner prescribed by society in a given time and place. Violence is always an option, if not always the smart or moral one. Point is, the right is "unalienable" in a very real sense. Nobody can take it from you. Because of this, it underwrites all other rights, because if they are trampled far enough, we can activate the most ancient and powerful of all rights.
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