You Have No Right ...

 

You have no right. (As I do not either)

You have no right. No right to pluck that flower from that field and take it with you to your humble abode. No right to caress the shoulder of a stranger. Yet you do it anyway.

You have no right to touch the person next to you. Yet you do it. You place your hand on their shoulder or caress an occasional neck. You pull out the weeds in your front yard when they are just trying to survive. Like everything else living in this world. We plunder, build and plow. Creating concrete jungles and deep holes. Scars in the earth and perfectly symmetrical structures to impress and house the masses.

Yet what gives us the right to rape and pillage the world around us? To carve it up into our own liking and purpose. Trees can’t move, but spread their roots in the soil creating a symbiotic relationship with the environment. A place for creatures and an enricher of soil. The giver of life. The birthplace of plants and other creatures. Other animals of the world tend to be less creatively invasive. They may build little structures, but they tend to wax and wane with the cycle of nature. A circle or oval of life if you will. A process of birth and decay.

Nature could be seen as a battleground from our own biased perspective, but it is that beauty of survival that has created the world we live and built in today. Nature (or what we call it) is akin to a divine intelligence. A mysterious force of material and cooperative action. In what way has this idea of nature given us any right to aggress against it or mold it into our own liking? We like to segment and place all the native wild parts of nature away from our straight lines concrete jungles. Was it all just a part of the process? Was there an inevitability to what the human race would become?

We invent these rights as symbols of making sense of our own autonomy and how we want to move in the world. Most of us want to be left alone. Some want to control others. At the end of the day it seems that we don’t want to be under the threat of a powerful force whether it brandishes a knife or yields a type of gun. In the end we grant the power of some type of authority to legitimize what we think might give us the right to defend or aggress against another person or piece of self perceived property.

We have much right to be stupid as we have to be smart.

Does any individual have any right to do something to another individual? It’s one thing if it is consensual, but if someone chooses to use some type of power against another person to attain an end, does that make it right? Interesting. We dive into some Moral territory on this one. Much like the Golden Rule. It would be of great use to think that by doing onto others what has been done to you could be a great motivator in avoiding conflict. If I am not willing to accept the consequences of aggressing against someone else then do I really even have a sense of what a "right" could be?

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It comes down to the imposition of will. What gives us the the right to impose our will on others and the environment around us? To form the world in our image at any cost. There is always going to be cost and benefits with each action. These so called rights that we have given to ourselves or trusted with people in power to give to us, have merely liberated and blinded us to our own sense of self worth and determination. In what ways have we perhaps fallen into a predatory delusion?

One could say that might makes right. The use of force or even violence could be a means to enforce a right whether it is through a direct physical use or the creation of a law from a centralized power. Do we have the right to protect ourselves? To defend ourselves against aggressors? Well, none of us want to get hurt. We can all agree to that concept. We all have an instinct towards survival. The thought of death keeps us from making rash decisions. One could say that no one has the right to hurt another person unless it is in self defense or has some moral preventative justification that will prevent others in the future from getting hurt. The big guy always has the potential to squash the little guy even if no blow is struck. Intimidation and coercion can work wonders I getting your way, but  can or will it benefit the rights of another? 

How we choose to challenge how we act or react with others in the world is important. There are ripples waves of cause and effect. It's a cycle of actions and reactions. Pushes and pulls. If we held up a mirror to a person we were thinking about imposing our will on, would we act the same way? Would we treat ourselves like our own worst enemies in a heated moment? It changes things when you realize that we fall prey to so many idealistic delusions that separate us from seeing the world for how it is. In all its confusing glory and brutal facets. We are stuck in a web of power plays where we see the legitimacy of rights nestled in the hierarchy of centralized authoritative structures. How much of us are just pawns in a game much bigger in ourselves that has us fight over what we think is legitimate? 

DG