Sunday, March 7, 2021

Catalog of Frauds: Entry #1: "Structuring Rights as Privileges"

Engineers of various stripe often come up with cook books of patterns, which are more or less standardized solutions to familiar problems. 

Propagandists have their own pattern cookbook. It makes sense to know your adversary's tools. It also makes sense to know your own tools, with which to dismantle such conceptual bombs and render them safe:  The Fallacy Files

Our society has sadly accepted some of these fraudulent propositions as standard, and so it makes sense to catalog them here, in no particular order. 

In this series, we'll examine some of these patterns. 

Structuring the exercise of rights as privileges

This is one of the master patterns, which manifests in any number of ways. 

Precondition: An individual who is not confident in what his rights actually are, where they exist in the hierarchy of rights, why these prerogatives are actually rights to begin with, and what the nature of the just limitation of the exercise of rights is. 

Distinction Between Right and Privilege: Although propagandists encourage sloppy use of language,  "privilege" is not an equally interchangeable synonym for "right", as the words carry important distinctions. A right is a prerogative unconditionally belonging to a person. A privilege is a power belonging to one person, which is granted to another who would not ordinarily have such a power. For example, living in my house is my right, by virtue of my just acquisition of that property. For you, living in my house is a privilege as a guest, granted by me, subject to my good will and your good behavior. 

The Pattern: The exercise of activity X is positioned as a privilege granted by the king/government/society/the Elks club. As a privilege, its exercise is subject to conditions. 

Common Implementation Detail: Some sort of permission slip is considered necessary evidence of the grant of the privilege, the obtaining of which 

The Swindle: This swindle operates simultaneously on several levels. The essential core of it is theft by conversion, in that the primary authority to exercise a right is transferred from the individual who legitimately owns the right to some other entity who claims to be operating as an administrator of the right. A key secondary component is moral confusion regarding what the basis of just limitations on the exercise of a right actually are, as the practical administration of just limitations is the usual stalking horse used to smuggle the premise in, resulting in unjustified limitations of exercise. As to that, there will generally be a hue and cry that "No rights are absolute! There are always limitations! You can't yell 'Fire!' in a movie theater!" This is a clear indication that the person doesn't understand what they are talking about. While it is true that one's limit of the general right of free action stops when it comes to bringing unjustified harm to another party, this does not justify pre-emptive administrative rights by a third party, nor does it justify any other condition outside of that placed upon the exercise of a right. 

The Result:  The rights holder is ultimately transformed from a first class entity operating on its own moral authority to a second class entity supplicating some other source for permission to exercise its own rights.  In the context of humans practically alienated from their own inalienables, it is possible and inevitable to sneak in all manner of unjustified conditions and restrictions without effective objection,

Examples:  Driver's licenses, gun licenses, property purchase permits, passports, and the insidious doctrine of "implied consent", which deserves its own section. All of these activities, travel, owning and carrying the instrumentality of defense, owning property, and so forth are all expressions of fundamental rights. 

"Implied Consent": This is a perfect, pernicious example of smuggling in outrageous conditions. Most (all?) states have some formulation of this doctrine. The chain of logic basically purports that since driving on public roads is a state granted privilege, the state stipulates that by accepting this privilege, it is implied that you consent to invasive searches and sampling of your bodily gasses, fluids and tissues whenever the state deems that you may be operating your vehicle impaired. Should you refuses such invasive sampling, your "privilege" of driving will be revoked, whether you're impaired or not. 


Ethically Superior Remedy: A lot of people will immediately object: "What the hell is wrong with you? Do you WANT people to drive drunk, presenting a menace to the public?" Well, of course I don't. To the extent one authentically exposes the public to the strong likelihood of harm and placing people in jeopardy, one is legitimately acting outside of the scope of one's rights. When operating outside the scope of one's rights, one proportionally forfeits the expectation that one's own rights would be respected, and so it is eminently feasible to stop, inspect, and potentially arrest a driver who is jeopardizing members of the public. We already have ethical structures towards that end, with appropriate safeguards with which to achieve the same results that are pursued under fraudulent premise. 

This is true across the board: when one acts outside the scope of one's legitimate rights, a moral society constructs ethically valid means of pursuing the legitimate ends of assisting the individual in protecting their own rights. Fostering unethical means towards those goals promotes excess, theft of power, weak character in the populace, and creates endless opportunity for rent seeking, graft and corruption. 

Offered, FWIW.

Whether you choose to "vaccinate" or not, or choose to accept additional risk in the from of a booster as the pandemic fades, this...