One of the most important questions a revolting man must ask himself is when is it acceptable to rebel? The founding fathers had to ask this question. Christianity and the entire history of the world to that point seemed to scream that submission was required in all things no matter what and so there could never be a justification for revolt. And yet another part of every man's conscience tells him that there is a point when he must resist tyranny and evil if he is to not be guilty of it. But where is that point? When can a man take a stand, trangress the laws and authorities that in the past he was accustomed to obey, and know in his heart he is in the right? After all, any thief or murderer can, and many do, claim they are freedom fighters resisting tyranny when really all they are is self serving criminals who are the reason government is necessary to begin with. In America we attempted to answer this quesion with the Declaration of Independence, which claimed that our Revolution was justified by King George's trampling of our "certain inalienable rights and that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It's an argument I am not comfortable with. I believe that the American Revolution was a just rebellion. But I am not comfortable with the reasoning laid out in the Declaration. I take exception with the phrase "inalienable rights." Inalienable means something can not be taken or given away. It is an inseparable part of you, no more able to be excised than your soul or consciousness. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not inalienable though. The laws of every nation and indeed the conscience of every person allow for execution, incarceration and the socially sanctioned loss of property. There is nothing you possess, not land, not family, wealth or even life, that can not be morally taken from you under some circumstances. A murderer can be executed, a molester can lose his children, a fraud can lose his wealth; and all of them can be locked away for the rest of their lives. The fact that societies are judged tyrannical or free based on the mechanisms they use to take away their citizen's life, liberty and goods is all the proof you need that these things are not rights that are "inalienable" to you. They are freedoms. They are liberties. In some quarters they are considered indulgences or allowances, but they are most definitely not inalienable rights. So what are your inalienable rights? Do you have any? If your very life can lawfully be taken away from you what could you possibly have that would be "inalienable"? Our Declaration of Indepence, our most important and most flawed founding document, was written by our least important and most flawed founding father, Thomas Jefferson. I won't go into all of the reasons for my antipathy towards Jefferson. His failings are well known. He was arrogant, disloyal and petty. His treatment of John Adams was deplorable. But his worst sin was his total immersion in the so called Enlightenment and humanism. These twin ideologies of death led to the nonsensical idea that there is some intrinsic wellspring inside the human soul that extends outside itself to protect those things and people dear to it. It's a lie and one of the worst ever told. And it is a weak argument to base a revolution on; not only demonstrably false, it also set one group of people's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness against another group's with no mechanism to determine who was in the right. Could the British be deprived of their lives and property in order that the Colonist could enjoy theirs? Why? Can anyone declare that they are unhappy and their liberty threatened and begin to take the same from others? The Declaration did a great job of listing the Colonists' grievances and served more than fair warning that they weren't going to sit idly by and endure them anymore, but did it establish the moral authority under which they were upending the legal framework of the last 1,700 years? I don't believe so. A much more cogent argument would have been to list our only true inalienable rights and declare that the exercise of those rights had led the Colonists to demand certain liberties. If they had done so much of the misery of the revolutions to follow; the French, Haitian and Bolshevick at least, may have been averted. These revolutions were based on this idea, put forth in the Declaration of Independence, that the desire for and the ability to exist in certain liberties was intrinsic too and inalienable from every person. Subsequent events have proven this idea to be very wrong. So what are our truly inalienable rights? What is the legitimate basis for a rebellion against tyranny, whether it be personal or corporate, internal or external? The only two things you possess that can not be taken away from you and can justify your every action is your ability to decide what is good and evil and to resist the wrong to death. These things can not be taken away from you. No matter what, you can decide in your heart what is good and what is evil. No one can stop the meditations of your heart. And once having decided what you believe is good, no one can stop you from resisting what is evil. The very act of imprisoning you or even killing you assumes continued restistance so that even if you are blinded and your toungue cut out and you are chained in a dungeon, you are still capable of resistance. Your very existence in that case is resistance. These facts; that moral agency and the the ability to resist on some level can never be taken away from you, are self-evident proof that you have the right to rebel. In fact you have no other rights at all, only liberties that are secured by the exercise of your true rights to decide between good and evil and to resist the evil. Now to make exercising these rights less costly there are some liberties that should never be given up. It is easier to resist evil if you can convince allies to join you so the freedom of the press and of speech should be guarded jealously. And since your right to resist can be fraught with peril, the freedom to bear arms should never be relinguished. Because while you have the right to resistance, you are not insulated from the results of that resistance or even the resistance of others to you. God help you if you are confronted by an evil stronger than yourself, but don't expect mercy if you have been weakened by your own hand. The freedom to be robustly armed should never be relinquished because then your other freedoms become nothing but indulgences allowed to you by another and can be taken away at any time along with your property and loved ones. So this then is the philosophy of Revolution. This is how a man can know when it is morally acceptable to rebel. It is always morally acceptable to decide what is evil and rebel against it. It is an inalienable right of every man, who because he can not be prevented from choosing between good and evil, and once having chosen can not, short of death, be stopped from resisting on some level, to revolt against those people and institutions he deems evil; recognizing that he is also subject to the resistance of other men who also can not be stopped from choosing between good and evil. Let no one tell you then that revolution was only for a certain time and has been dispensed with, and while it was once a great virtue it is now a grievous crime. Revolution is the natural result of exercising your only two God given rights. With it you can secure for yourselves and your posterity the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, things which no one else can or will secure for you. That is what our Founding Fathers did. This is what we are called on to do every day in our personal lives, and maybe one day in our civic lives.
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AuthorThe Revolting Man lives at the end of a dirt road at the bottom of a hill at the top of a valley in the foothills of the Appalachians. Archives
December 2016
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