The Real Reason We're Losing Our Rights
Less than a year out from the Canadian Covid mandate mania, some plandemic restrictions remain in place while others are suspended but not revoked. Currently, Bills C-11 and C-21 are ping-ponging between the Senate and the House of Commons. No matter how many volleys ultimately transpire, the game is set to end with increased restrictions on the types of firearms and speech legally permitted to Canadians.
Media outlets, especially the ones that are not government mouthpieces, have extensively covered which Canadian freedoms are on the parliamentary chopping block and by who’s initiative. What’s missing from the conversation is a deeper understanding of why any of this is happening at all.
To properly understand why we’re losing our rights, we need to address the quintessential questions of what rights are, and where they come from.
It should be obvious from the outset that legal rights are not the same thing as human rights. Slavery was legal in Canada and the United States; Apartheid in South Africa. Hitler passed laws to make his actions legal in Nazi Germany.
Legal rights are invented by legislators, according to what the rulers of a particular land mass desire to achieve at the time. They aren’t necessarily moral, and they are definitely not universal. Whether it’s the number of children a couple can have in China, how many wives a man is allowed in Sudan,1 or which substances a citizen can, cannot, or must put into their bodies, what legal rights essentially amount to are the preferences of a ruler or governing body.
If governments were honest about this, they would surely receive a great number of polite rejections to their requests. Instead, they use tax dollars to hire law enforcement and build prisons. Increasingly, they buy media outlets2 to smear and silence dissenters. Since most people don’t want to spend time in jail or be generally shunned by society, they largely abide by the preferences of the rulers.
While this is by and large how societies have been operating for quite some time, it has nothing to do with actual human rights and is the very reason we find ourselves living in clown world. If we don’t want to die here as well, or leave things as they are for future generations, it’s vitally important that we fully understand the true nature and origins of human rights.
The modern conception of human rights generally holds that they are the inherent, universal rights belonging equally to all persons, regardless of the myriad ways in which individual people are different from each other.
In terms of where human rights come from, modern dictionaries are silent. The question just doesn’t come up. Why is that?
In previous iterations, the concept of human rights was always connected to a power beyond that of any human beings. Logic dictates that if all persons are endowed with a worthiness that is inherent and intrinsic, this could not have been put there by another person or group of people. It must have come before.
Medieval Christian discourse held that all persons possess dignity and value by virtue of Imago Dei, the Latin term for the concept that human beings are created in the image of God. Since the value of a human being comes from God, no human or human institution has the authority to take it away.3
During the enlightenment, John Locke expressed virtually the same idea in his explanation of natural rights. In his two Treatises on Government published in 1689 and 1690, he explicitly defended the position that no government can legitimately infringe on the rights of others because there are moral laws in existence that apply to everyone:
“All men by nature are equal in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man; being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions”.4
Since no person has the right to harm anyone else, it’s logically impossible for someone to grant that right to anyone else. As Locke reasoned, “The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves”.
Modern philosophers and scholars tend to distance themselves from Locke, or anyone else who espouses a worldview that includes any notion of the Divine. They prefer instead to adhere to the modern sensibilities of atheism and moral relativism. As much as this school of thought likes to call itself “progressive”, this actually creates a real conundrum when it comes to human rights. Without acknowledging a higher power, you can’t explain how these rights came into existence. The rulers and dictionaries of today prefer to ignore the question entirely, perhaps until such a time when an explanation like “human rights are created by the United Nations” will go unchallenged.
Even so, that wouldn’t make it True. Anyone can make the claim to authority, but doing so does not make the claim legitimate. As I’ve written previously, there is such a thing as objective, moral Truth and it can be known and communicated.
The first Truth about human rights is that they are woven into the fabric of existence, put in place by a force greater than that of human beings. By whichever name you call this higher Power, the point is that there is no person or group of people that actually have the authority to grant or revoke human rights.
The second Truth about human rights is that they can only be fully understood by defining what they are not. This is because what human rights encompass would be a practically infinite list. Rights are actions, and a person has the right to do anything that is not wrong.
It’s as much of a coincidence as myocarditis post 2021 that the word “right” refers to both what we are allowed to do and what is moral. Rights are actions that do not transgress the Laws of morality. Wrongdoings, which are not rights, make up but a very short list:
Murder
Assault
Rape
Theft
Trespass
Coercion
Willfully lying
Each of these actions are wrongdoings for the same basic reason: they violate the inherent rights of others to be free from harm. As violations, they constitute the very definition of violence. The French word viol, the root of “violence”, literally means “rape”.
The word “violence” has become increasingly weaponized in recent years. Of all the things that violence is most definitely not (honking horns, speaking words), the most crucial to understand is self defense. Only an action which initiates harm to someone else in one of the seven ways listed above can rightly be called violence. By initiating this harm, a person forfeits their natural right to freedom from actions being taken against them.
Remember fighting with your siblings and your mother intervening with the line, “It doesn’t matter who started it!”? Your mother was incorrect; who started it is the ONLY thing that matters.
Conceptually, these true Seven Sins are all variations of one transgression: the act of theft. Murder is the theft of someone else’s life. Assault is the theft of another’s physical wellbeing. Rape is the theft of freewill sexual association. Theft is the stealing of property. Trespass, the theft of security of someone’s living domain. Coercion is the theft of freewill choice under threat of violence or duress. Willfully lying is the theft of necessary information which negatively impacts someone else’s ability to engage in informed decision-making.5
Simply put, human rights are any actions that are NOT a variation of theft.
When government laws are aligned with moral law, they are redundant. Superimposing legislation on top of Universal Laws only leads to convoluted structures of regulations. These regulations, enforced with tax dollars by police and revenue agents, inevitably serve to protect the ruling classes and restrict the freedoms of everyone else.
Does Bill C-21 apply to the firearms used by police forces? Of course not. Bill C-11 is literally designed to ensure that people only get information from government-approved sources.
The solution to our problem is so clear that it’s almost invisible. Beneath the tangled mess of superimposed regulations that govern our society, our inherent and intrinsic rights are as intact as they ever were and always will be. No person or group of people can change this.
Only by accepting false claims of authority do we create the conditions that we’re experiencing today. As we believe, so we act. As we act, so we build the societal structures we inhabit. We are quite literally funding the open-air prison that Canada has become with every commercial transaction we engage in that punts 5% in GST to the federal government. If this is not a voluntary contribution, it is theft.
If we want to live in and leave a free world for future generations, we need to deeply examine all of our beliefs and where they don’t align with objective morality, to change them. As our beliefs increasingly align with objective morality, so will our actions. The kind of society we build is literally up to us.
To learn more, explore the many resources available here.
John Locke, The Two Treatises of Government, (1690)
Mark Passio and the Science of Natural Law. Executive Producer: Mark Passio, 2021.