On Rights and Duties

Delegation of responsibility is simply how our society allows for more people to do more things and increase the technological advantage of craft. The more technology develops, the more focused people need to become to manage the complexity, and the less people need to generalize to survive. There are then both positive and negative incentives to delegate and specialize in a technological society. As a technological species, that is the natural direction of social evolution.

That being said, there are certain things we cannot delegate, and those things are what we work for: our freedom of thought, our free time, our freedom to reproduce, and our freedom of social organization. These freedoms are not guaranteed but take civic action to maintain, and if we want those freedoms, we cannot delegate civic duty to others as a culture, or most people will delegate those responsibilities and those freedoms will be taken.

Not everyone is a leader, not everyone can come up with an action plan, but anyone can be the first to support someone who is a leader and a visionary. The most influential people in the world are not those who start a movement, but the first 8% of supporters who throw their support behind someone with a vision and an action plan. These initial supporters are too rare in our society, especially for civics, since so few people want to get involved in politics and even fewer are willing to support something new that has no initial evidence of succeeding.

For this reason, visionaries need to be selective in how they present themselves, and if they are not, they need to find a figurehead capable of leading the movement. Part of my challenge to the world is: do they have the tolerance to follow a man who is unflinching in his convictions and hides nothing in his presentation? I write extensively on secular gnostic theology, and this is a position no one else holds but me. Yet I also am writing on political theory that could renovate and isolate our democracy from threat. Can anyone see the utility of my politics and support it despite not agreeing with my theological positions or proclivities? We will see.

For me, it is an experiment. If I were to be serious about this and do everything I could to succeed, I would hide my true self, pick a figurehead, and polish my optics for political presentation. However, I am doing things differently, and I hope that starting out as a philosopher and an artist can be used to my advantage when my character comes under question as an activist. Will anyone see this and get behind it? Eventually, I think some may, and I will demonstrate through artistic activism that people will get behind a philosopher and an artist when politicians and businessmen have fallen out of favor.

That being said, that is my gambit. The reason I try is because I know if people don’t start willingly trying to save their freedoms, they will be taken away. Already, freedom of speech and thought are being restricted. The reproductive freedoms we have been granted are always under threat by fundamentalist groups who believe people don’t have the maturity to think for themselves and want to revert to biblical simplicity and rational faith.

There is a great incentive for foreign governments to permeate our culture with memes of racial and sexual bigotry so that the politicians of their choice can use those triggers to influence voter turnout and change the geopolitical order once elected off crude bias by employing sophisticated and destructive policy changes. This is exactly what happened in the USA, where Russia decided they wanted Trump elected, made it look like they didn’t, and pumped social media with bots to promote the culture that supported Trump, letting his pre-existing policy decisions work in their favor once elected.

Civic duty cannot be delegated; it should be universally suffered, not just in voting and referenda, but in activism and civil disobedience should the political framework stop serving the public’s freedoms. It is sane and rational for people to arrange a society where they do no harm to each other, allow each to have the same rights as everyone else, and restrict themselves in ways they see fit for their harmless living industry if they find the freedoms others have been granted—though harmless—grotesque or offensive. For that reason, although we should always fight for our freedoms, we should also have tolerance of others that use those freedoms in ways we find grotesque.

Reproductive freedoms are particularly guttural responses. Our preferences for reproductive behavior are deeply ingrained instinctually and vary from person to person. This does not mean that we have a right to force others to surrender to our ideals about how to reproduce or raise our children. The only thing that matters is that there is no harm done in the reproductive process. Harm then needs a stark and clear definition, and this should be that there is no lasting damage done to a conscious human being.

A living human being would have different implications that could not be accounted for because that would mean that women were responsible for the eggs in their ovaries and could be criminally liable for being unhealthy. So rationally, once a human being is conscious, then we should protect them as we protect any other human being because there needs to be a distinction between life (the cellular property of having a metabolism) and humanity (the living property of having a human mind).

Yet this means that the mind must be protected, and so the parent must protect the mind of their child in such a way that no lasting harm befalls the child. To what standard do we hold the parent in the education of their child? To the lowest universal standard available since the diversification of thought is necessary for the diversification of the human species as a technological species. Any further restrictions would limit the parents’ creative freedom in raising the child however they see fit, within the traditions they see fitting.

The future of our natural evolution will be determined now, as we unlock the creative potential of the mechatronic revolution with AI and other forms of machine intelligence. What we delegate and what we consider a natural duty will determine the future evolution of our species, and so, what we consider fundamental as a right and as a duty—what we are willing to tolerate in others so we may have freedom to choose for ourselves—will be critical in deciding which way our species goes from this point over the next thousands and millions of years.