There is something very wrong with our concept of rights -- especially with the concept of social contract rights.

You can see what was amiss all along in the idea of social contract rights when you look at those plastic busts of Elvis grinning up at you from their neat little rows on the shelves of the mega-mart. In the long train of events that led to the creation of those plastic Elvises you can see the indiscriminate license, and waste, and eventually coerced waste that is the consequence of social contract rights in this finite world . It's an ugly thing, all that coerced Working For The Purpose Of Buying, all that coerced waste of the stuff of societal vitality -- imagination, ingenuity, genuine individuality. It's ugly and we don't look at it much. Instead, we gaze acquisitively at all the stuff lining the shelves of the mega-mart. But we had better take a hard look at it right now. It is the breeding ground for a species of worm that is eating away at our vitals. And the worm's meal has but a course or two left.

THE UNNATURAL RIGHT TO WASTE

Rights is one of those concepts bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. Rights has to do with defining what we may fence other people off from, which is how we have been schooled to think about liberty since the Enlightenment. According to the lexicon of the Enlightenment there are two varieties of rights. Natural rights are those rights we have by virtue of the needs that are common to us all, needs that are common to us all because they inhere in our common human nature. Social contract rights are those rights we ostensibly acquire by virtue of consentual compacts with other men. In his Essay Concerning The True Original, Extent, And End Of Civil-Government a prominent Enlightener, John Locke, gave us examples of these two varieties of rights.
In the chapter Of Property Locke noted that men had a natural common right to that which they could obtain by foraging, and that the limits of this natural right were set by personal need and waste -- a man had an exclusive right to only what he could, without waste, personally consume (use) to satisfy his natural needs. Locke also noted that men had a natural common right to appropriate land from the common, and that the limits of this natural right were set by need and waste and by leaving "enough, and as good left" for those as yet unprovided for.
Locke went on to note that at some point in human affairs men conferred on themselves, by virtue of compact, the right to greater amounts of land and other property. This social contract right quickly created a condition in which there was no longer land "enough, and as good left" in the world freely accessible to the unpropertied. This condition gave to land some value beyond that which labor and ingenuity added to it -- the value of human-created scarcity. This added value meant that a man had a right not only to claim large possessions of property but to let it go to waste -- for even waste land had some value to the owner now that there was no longer land "enough, and as good left". Thus the social contract right to own and to waste large possessions of land became part of the bundle of established property rights.

FENCES AND UNFREE MARKETS

The existence of the fences, physical and legal, made possible by the social contract right to large possessions of land, now deprive many men of free access to material necessaries with which to mix their labor. These fences, and the guns that defend them, are what put teeth into an owner's demand that his terms of trade be met or else, they enforce his or else -- his withholding access to his property, his wasting that property if he wishes. As I pointed out, they superadd to the value of the property that is contributed by labor and ingenuity the value resulting from human-created scarcity, a vicious value. It is important to keep in mind that the superadded value is vicious because there is now no longer "enough, and as good left" in the world freely accessible to all.
If there was still freely accessible land "enough, and as good left" in the world, the value added to an owner's land (and the property derived from it ) by the social contract right to large possessions of land would be only that value freely added as a result of the would-be trader's willingness to trade more of his labor (or produce) -- physical, or intellectual, or both -- for the land (or other property) that is to be potentially left to waste if the owner's terms of trade are not met. The reasons for this willingness might include an appreciation of the skill of the owner's workmanship, or an appreciation of the ease which the ingeniously devised item will make possible in the trader's future labors, or an appreciation of the location of the property. This condition is a truly Free-Market -- the values added to the items in the market have no hint of coercion in them.
"Enough, and as good left" is a precise formulation of the condition necessary to the existence of a Free-Market. Because it is not possible for unpropertied men to travel great distances when they are injuriously deprived of a material necessary, the "enough, and as good left" condition must be understood to apply locally -- that is, in practicable human terms -- and not merely cosmically. It is logically unsound to claim that a local market is free when the unnaturally scarce item in question is freely available half-way across the world but the trip half-way across the world is not physically practicable for those deprived of the item locally. The use of the word available in that context is absurd, making the sentence self-contradictory. For example, if I appropriated from the common a parcel of land that contained large quantities of a mineral necessary to human well-being and there are no other deposits of the mineral locally, then the market for that mineral would no longer be free -- the social contract right to large possessions of that which I can't personally consume would in this case introduce a value of coercion in the local trade for that mineral, an or else that entailed injurious deprivation to the would-be trader if he did not meet my terms of trade.
Why would any men consent, as Locke said they did, to a social compact that tossed out all original limitations on the rightful extent of property ownership? We now know why, in part -- because it allowed those who consented to get more from their property than they put into it. Even a man who was going to be put in a servile condition by such a compact might consent to it so long as that compact held out for him the possibility that he might one day be able to use what he obtained through his servility to gratify his desires for large possessions of property and the mastery over men they make possible.
But, of course, not all men consented freely, tacitly or otherwise, to the social compact that overthrew the rightful limitations on property acquisition set by common natural need . Many already lived in conditions of servility imposed on them by open violence or by the threat of violence and injurious deprivation, and these men accepted the "compact" in large part because they had not the force of arms sufficient to defeat the force employed to enforce it.
Locke's decision to avoid discussing the calculated violence (actually committed and merely threatened) that was in reality a part of the development of the social "compact" that made large possessions of land a right is understandable. He was a polemicist, interested in denaturing man in order to demonstrate how the trip from nature to civil society is short and easy for the "industrious" and "rational". It was not prudent for him to shine too bright a light on the violence underlying his social contract right. But the dissolving condition of our society gives us some reason to question whether Locke made an error by asserting that narrowly utilitarian social compacts made by brute force and unconnected to natural need are a proper basis for a political regime.
For the sake of clear understanding and analysis the social contract rights that are asserted by Enlightenment polemicists to be the product of freely given consent ought to be renamed. The new name ought to reflect the element of coercion that actually underlies these so-called rights. I shall use the term violence-created rights .

THE WORM

I have demonstrated how in conditions of scarcity the violence-created right to own large possessions of land and to control how others use that land and on what terms gives men a means of coercing out of other men more in receipt for access to land (and the goods derived from it) than is given. This coercion is the merely first in an appalling train of consequences.
The vicious value created by this coercion (along with uncoercive values placed on traded goods by personal judgment and personal whim) causes the value of money to fluctuate in day to day use.
Here is a simple example of how the coercion causes this fluctuation. (I give this example mindful that it is sometimes risky in a complex world to simplify, and with all due apologies to Karl Marx and Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, who examined these mechanisms very thoroughly.) One man owns a bread making enterprise -- including the land from which the ingredients and machinery and fuel and packaging used in bread making are produced. This land cost him practically nothing to purchase. Another man, who has no property but himself, works at the bread making enterprise and buys the bread from the enterprise. The laborer performs over the course of a year all the different types of labor that are required to produce the ingredients and machinery and fuel that he uses to make the bread. For this he is paid a wage that does not vary as his tasks vary. In the end it turns out that he receives one dollar for each loaf of bread he produces.
The owner sells a loaf of bread to the laborer for two dollars. The laborer pays this price because he has not the means to make bread himself for less -- all the land in the world is already owned and he has not enough money to buy land and start a bread making enterprise.
So, when the owner spends a dollar he gets a loaf of bread for it, but when the laborer spends a dollar he gets only half a loaf of bread for it. The property owner's power of setting the terms of these trades is what causes the value of that dollar to fluctuate.
The coercive power of the property owner to make the value of money fluctuate in his favor helps the property owner to accumulate money -- which creates a further advantage for him in property acquisition. The value to the owner of some of his large sum of money may differ from the value to the laborer of the laborer's small sum of money. The owner's second million dollars may not be as precious to him dollar for dollar as any of the laborer's hundred dollars is to the laborer. (Bohm-Bawerk explained this phenomenon in part with the concept of marginal utility .) This means that the owner may be willing to part with more of his many dollars for a piece of property he wants to buy than the laborer is willing (or able) to part with. Thus, marginal utility works to aid the wealthier in acquiring more and more property -- furthering the imbalance of the power to cause the value of money to fluctuate in the wealthier's favor.
The mechanisms of trade veil this coercion-induced fluctuation in the value of money, but it is almost always there -- often moreso because it is veiled. It is this veiled coercive power to cause the value of money to fluctuate -- power derived from the violence-created right to own large possessions of land and control how others use it -- that makes this violence-created right especially efficient as a means of concentrating wealth and accumulating money. And because money is the primary means with which land and property are exchanged in our system, so it is that this violence-created right creates a means with which to accumulate power over other men's lives -- the power to control what they have access to and how they labor.
This means of accumulating power facilitates the creation of monopolistic administrative schemes of power. The simplified example I just gave demonstrates the means by which corporations, for instance, are able to accumulate money and property at such an accelerated rate. Monopolistic schemes of power are the species of worm that is eating away at our social cohesion.
Some of these monopolistic schemes have the effect of draining from vital social institutions their socially relevant functions, which in turn deprives the members of these institutions of Valued Places and personal influence in communal affairs -- the things needed in order for genuine individuality to flourish. Others coerce us into forms of labor that we do not value, that do not obtain for us the human goods that labor must obtain for us if we are to find satisfaction in it.
For a century these monopolistic schemes have been worrisome to men concerned with the preservation of personal liberty. But the efforts at defanging the monopolizing power of the schemes -- largely formulated around the idea of administrative decentralization and diversification of power -- have come to naught, or worse. They have come to naught because they have not come to grips with the means of power monopolization that empower these schemes. They have come to worse than naught because they have reinforced the notion that these schemes can be defanged by better administrative techniques, merely. So long as the means of power monopolization are readily available, they will be used, and no efforts at balancing power within a society will long succeed. An examination of these schemes at work will demonstrate this point.

POWER LUST -- THE GATEKEEPER MENTALITY

A society that encourages and facilitates the acquisition and fencing-off of large possessions of land, for the purpose of setting the terms of the use of that land, cultivates a Gatekeeper Mentality in some of its people. This Gatekeeper Mentality is different in kind from the self-defense mentality of the person who is interested only in protecting what he owns and uses personally to satisfy his natural needs. The latter bent of mind is motivated by the desire for personal freedom. The Gatekeeper Mentality is also different in kind from simple greed and miserliness, which seeks merely to possess for the sake of possessing. The Gatekeeper Mentality is characterized by its desire for the power to control and direct the use of the resources of others. It is not merely interested in keeping others out, but in selecting who shall be let in, and on what terms.
The Gatekeeper Mentality carries with it the drive to create a certain amount of uniformity in others. This drive flows from the managerial hubris of the Gatekeeper -- the Gatekeeper is so certain his way is a better way that he is willing to force others to do things his way. It is this managerial hubris that sets the Gatekeeper to the task of monopolizing the control of the way things are done.
Though it appears that a symbiotic modus vivendi (The Third Way?) is being reached between the Gatekeeper Elites, there still exists some distinction between the predominantly commercial and the predominantly political schemes of power controlled by them. These schemes are still sufficiently distinct that they operate along converging lines of social destructiveness for a while. So, for a while I will treat them separately.

OVERBEARING MONEY

The commercial scheme works in the main by imposing on most of us the necessity of having money . This imposition has the effect of drawing an inordinate amount of a society's intellectual vigor into economic pursuits -- commercialism flourishes, and much of a society's ingenuity is directed towards devising means of increasing profits. One means of increasing profits is increasing a man's productivity. As productivity increases the cost of material necessaries decreases. The material standard of acquisition (the "standard of living") increases overall within society. Eventually, however, high-productivity becomes hyper-productivity, and the necessity of having money in the economic scheme that is now unbalanced by hyper-productivity becomes hyper-corrosive, socially.
When hyper-productivity is achieved all the necessaries (goods and services) of a society are produced or provided by a relatively small fraction of the available labor of a society. In an economic scheme powered by the manmade scarcity created and legitimized by our violence-created right to large possessions of property, and in which goods and services are distributed by money, this hyper-productivity means that there are no longer enough jobs, the produce of which is in high demand (and the wages of which are correspondingly high), to go around -- and especially to go around to those who wish to support more than themselves on their income. This is the point at which hyper-productivity becomes socially hyper-corrosive.
Because most people need money with which to purchase goods and services, and because most acquire money from working at a job, hyper-productivity means that in addition to the necessaries-producing jobs some sort of other jobs need to be created for folks to work at and make money at -- and these jobs are in the aggregate lower-paying than the now relatively scarce necessaries-producing jobs. (These created jobs are relatively lower paying because their produce is in low demand, or because they can be filled from a very large labor pool.) These jobs are in an important sense artificially created, and their advent and continued existence requires that a desire for their produce likewise be created or heightened artificially -- usually through the techniques of marketing. The term Consumption Society has been coined to describe this state of affairs. Through this process hyper-productivity begins to make it more and more difficult for more and more persons to support a family on a single income. As a result, a person must either work more hours per week in order to support a family, or more than one person in the family must go to work to make money.
The corrosive effect on the traditionally-structured family of this commercial Gatekeeper power scheme -- the Consumption Society -- is obvious, but it is not the only Gatekeeper scheme that acts to dissolve the family.

DOMINEERING CREDENTIALISM

The managerial hubris cultivated in the Gatekeeper Elite who dwell within the economic sphere is replicated in the Gatekeeper Elite who dwell in the political sphere. It is exemplified by the idea of improving men through their education, an idea given full voice by enlighteners from Plato to Locke to Rousseau to Horace Mann. Obligatory government-controlled schooling is its most prominent apparition. It appeared on the scene to weaken the family by draining away the family's traditional educative function at the moment hyper-productivity commenced its assault.
The political Gatekeeper Elite has set about monopolizing not only the education of children, but of all members of society. This Gatekeeper Elite has relentlessly worked to drain from labor-unions and professional guilds their educative and labor-directing functions by imposing government licensing schemes.
The scope of the license schemes is not confined to the labor formerly under the auspices of guilds and unions, but is expanding on a daily basis throughout the professional and occupational universe -- forcing people to acquire a government-approved education and to navigate through all manner of Gatekeeper-imposed complications, thereby fencing off a segment of society from certain valued forms of labor, and thereby exacerbating the wealth skewing effects of the hyper-productivity that has been induced and legitimized by the violence-created right to large possessions of property. These fences are literally blocking the flow of the lifeblood of societal vitality -- the flow of beneficial personal strength to weakness, from which we acquire our Valued Places.

THE PROVIDER STATE

With the dissolution of the family proceeding apace in consequence of the corrosive commercial and educational power monopolies, the managerial hubris of the political Gatekeeper Elite has moved them to take on the remaining tasks of the family, neighborhood, and church. And in addition they have been working hard to bring into existence new managerial tasks never before undertaken by any administrative schemers -- the administration of nationwide health care distribution schemes, for example.
The socially corrosive effects of the latest manifestations of the Provider State are of the same tenor as the effects of the government's education monopolization scheme. These schemes have drained vital functions from the social institutions that used to stand between the individual and the state. As these vital functions have drained away so to has the the allegiance of people to those institutions. And as those institutions have withered the opportunities they gave to people for finding Valued Places and personal influence in communal affairs have withered, too.
The alienation and isolation that have followed in the wake of this vitality drain, and the social pathologies that alienation and isolation feed -- violent crime, addiction, illegitimacy -- have created even more opportunities for managerial hubris to flourish.
A thorough look at every corrosive manifestation of the Provider State is beyond the scope of this essay. But one aspect of the Provider State has been given too little attention, and its neglect is part and parcel of the blank failure to stem the worm's insinuation into every nook and cranny of life. That aspect is the Empowering Class.

THE EMPOWERING CLASS

I have demonstrated how a system of property ownership rights that was established by open violence, the threat of open violence, and by "compact", and which the passage of time has conventionalized, has empowered the commercial Gatekeeper Elite. But the political Gatekeeper Elite have not been empowered by that established system of violence-created rights of property alone. They have been empowered also by the Empowering Class of democratic citizens, who are empowered by other violence-created rights.
The democratic citizen, a creature who is treated by our politics (and by the fallacious 17th century view of human nature on which our politics is based) as an atom, is not a natural being. He is quite literally a figment of the human imagination, come to life.
He is imagined to be a naturally solitary "self" who has within him the capacity to be autonomous, self-sufficing. This imagined nature is as essentially false as the Nature-Society dichotomy of which it was begotten -- the experiences of the isolate and the fact of mankind's a priori socialization demonstrate this conclusively.
This citizen atom is schooled by our culture to calculate his narrowly "enlightened" self-interest within an essentially economic formula. He is also schooled by our culture to exercise his violence-created rights -- that is, to build fences around as much as he can. And he is schooled to use the political system in order to protect those violence-created rights. This schooling results in a creature who thinks a great deal about money, and about what other persons have control of that he would like to have control of, and about making political "compacts" in order to get that control. He is something of a petty tyrant.
In a modern society -- hyper-productive, license-based, waste-driven -- this creature is a powerful political entity. But his political power is not easy for him to personally wield effectually. In fact, the theory of democratism that gave him this political power makes it possible for him to wield it effectually only when he is wielding it as part of a majority. This fact makes the power practicably meaningless to the citizen atom from time to time -- whenever he is in the minority. All of which makes political organizers important to the citizen atom -- as it makes him important to them.
The citizen atom has something else that is important to the political organizer -- money; money with which to hire Gatekeepers and policemen and weapons with which to guard fences and control gates, for control of fences and gates is the way power over men is wielded in a society based on violence-created rights. Pierre Joseph Proudhon put it well, "Money, money, always money -- this is the crux of democracy."
The desires for money and control of resources cultivated in the citizen atom by our culture, the vicious conditions of competition in our culture of violence-created rights that make the citizen atom feel enslaved to varying degrees, the importance of the citizen atom to the political organizers who in our democratized culture offer him a chance to play master, these make the citizen atom a relatively willing and powerful accomplice in putting over the schemes of power monopoly hatched by the political Gatekeeper mentality. Through and through this citizen atom is a creature of violence-created rights.
And so it is that the total politicization of life is so easily being accomplished by the political Gatekeeper Elite. Even the creation of a nationwide health care system is not beyond the power hungry Gatekeeper with such accomplices at hand,

EMERGING FROM ENLIGHTENMENT DARKNESS

The social dissolution being wrought by the worm that has been bred on violence-created rights will not be stopped by tinkering with the administrative structures of power in our culture, not so long as these rights continue to be enforced. Nor will preaching the virtues of responsibility to corporations and citizens slow the worm's corrosive progress. To rid ourselves of the worm we shall have to deprive him of his breeding ground -- the social contract rights (violence-created rights) that are an indiscriminate license to fence folks off from what they need free access to. This will require a precise formulation of right, a more precise formulation than has been bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. With that precise formulation in hand we can begin the task of unlearning the schooling we have received about the righteousness of our mis-named social contract rights.
One difficulty that we are immediately faced with in precisely formulating right is the question of whether our judgments about what is and what is not a righteous human desire have any objectively valid basis. If we cannot demonstrate that they do, then we shall be unable to establish any objective criteria for judging what we ought to have a right to. We will then be left with the old formulations of the boundary of right -- "I have a right to do anything that doesn't injure someone else" or "I have a right to do anything that doesn't injure the Common Good" -- formulations that leave only subjective calculations of utility, and brute force, as the judge and enforcer of what is "needless" and "injurious to others" and the "Common Good".
The Enlighteners and their followers made tremendous epistomological efforts to remove moral judgments from the realm of knowledge and to consign those judgments to the realm of mere opinion. In doing so they chose to disconnect right from need, and connected it to utility and promiscuous desire -- opening the door to the indiscriminate license that is plaguing us now.
We shall have to work hard now to undo their efforts. Aristotle gave us the tool with which to do this work -- the concept of Right Desire.

RIGHT DESIRE

In his Nichomachean Ethics (Book 6, section 2) Aristotle suggested that there was another type of truth besides the truth that conforms to things as they really are. This other type of truth conforms to Right Desire.
Without the concept of Right Desire a problem posed by an insight David Hume made is insoluble.
David Hume saw that a prescriptive conclusion cannot be drawn from a premise that is entirely descriptive. Hume's insight is one of the underpinnings of the moral relativism that has pervaded moral philosophy since the Enlightenment. This relativism proclaims that if Hume's assertion is correct, then there can be no valid "ought" judgments -- and what a man does can be judged only on how well it achieves for him the fulfillment of his desires. Moral relativism is a problem in the context of properly conceiving liberty and right for the obvious reason that it removes from the concept of liberty and right any boundaries set by what is objectively good for man, and extends the boundaries of liberty to some nebulous region of Utility in maximizing pleasure and ease. Hume's assertion was crucial to removing the moral claims of religion from the realm of knowledge and to consigning them to the realm of opinion.
But Relativism's proclamation is not correct, because of the existence of a truth that conforms to Right Desire.
What is Right Desire?
As its name implies, it is the desire to seek what we ought to. And what ought we to seek? Simply answering, " The good," won't solve the problem of subjectivism and relativism because Baruch Spinoza is certainly correct that we often call a thing good merely because we desire it.
The problem can be solved by differentiating between types of desires. One type of desire we acquire as a result of our experiences, these desires differ from individual to individual and from time to time. Another type of desire is that which inheres in man's nature, and these desires are therefore the same (in kind, if not in degree) in all members of the human species. From here on I'll use the phrase natural need to refer to particulars of the type of desire that inheres in our nature, and acquired want to refer to particulars of the other type of desire.
We cannot have a natural need to seek and to possess when attained anything in a degree of excess that injures our ability to fulfill all our natural needs, or to a degree that knowingly and unnecessarily injures other's ability to fulfill all their natural needs. This is so because that which makes a man's unity possible cannot at the same time and in the same respect make that man's unity impossible. This unity -- the unified totality of a whole life enriched by all one's rightly fulfilled needs, needs which are mutually interdependent and complimentary and counter-balancing when fulfilled -- is happiness, philosophically conceived to be the total good. And because some of our natural needs are for certain types of association with men whose efforts to attain happiness we are aiding, the prohibition against injurious excess extends to that which is injurious to others.
Thus all our desires for that which fulfills our natural needs are Right Desires, and whatever fulfills a natural need is an actual good, not merely an apparent good -- whether we have a noticeable desire for it or not.
This difference between natural need and acquired want makes possible the statement of the following self-evident truth: We ought to seek whatever is good (whatever we have a natural need for) and nothing else.
This self-evident truth makes possible the solution of the problem posed by David Hume's insight.
By starting with the above self-evident truth as a premise and superadding a descriptive truth about human nature, one can move to a conclusion that contains prescriptive truth. This means that an "ought" judgment has objective truth if it is an expression of a desire for a good in a degree that fulfills a natural need. This in turn means that one may move certain moral judgments from the realm of opinion -- subjective and relative -- to the realm of knowledge -- objective and absolute.
This concept of Right Desire gives us some objective means with which to determine the boundary between liberty and license, means which will help to clarify what one has a right to.

THE PROPER FORMULATION OF RIGHT

With our "ought" judgments now firmly reconnected to natural needs we can see that there is only one species of political right that is morally defensible, that there is only one species of right that we ought to have -- the species John Locke referred to as natural common right. There are no morally valid rights that derive from compact merely. This means that one has a right -- a natural common right -- to seek and to possess when obtained only that for which one has natural needs. When seeking and possessing something not itself naturally needed results in the natural good of satisfaction AND when the object sought is innocuous when possessed -- that is, when its possession does not produce injurious privation to anyone -- the pursuit and possession of such an object is also a natural common right.
With regard to land, this means that one has the natural common right to the exclusive possession of only that land one's exclusive and personal consumption of satisfies one's natural needs -- exclusive possession of land to any greater degree constitutes license and not liberty, and is not a right. (An exception to this is the case of ownership of excess land when the excess is worked by the owner and the produce of this excess land is not withheld from others on condition of the owner receiving something in exchange for the produce. So long as the owner of this land is not unnecessarily depriving anyone of material necessaries by virtue of the way he is working the excess, his possession of the land is innocuous, and his working of it is a natural common right.)
This means, in course, that a great deal of the absentee ownership -- especially of rented properties -- now countenanced by the violence-created rights to large possessions of property is not properly a right. The distributism suggested by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton is worthy of a more thorough look in light of this proper conception of natural common right.
This proper formulation of natural common right will have a profound effect on our political power structures as well, as it must have on all power structures that grew out of the Enlightenment's vision that a rational man is primarily an Economic creature. The general tenor of the effects throughout society will be to shorten lines of communication between leaders and the led, to increase the value of personal authority (an endogenous force) as it decreases the means of obtaining power (an exogenous force), and to diffuse the power within society into a variety of institutions as the ability of any administrative scheme to monopolize power will be weakened by the loss of the easy means of power concentration that was license-created wealth.

CONCLUSION

To unlearn the fallacious schooling we have received about our rights we will, however, need more than the proper formulation of natural common right. We will also need to liberate our thinking from the notion of "self" that shackles us today -- the notion that a human is by nature a solitary and autonomous "self", that the individual has within him, irrespective of his associational contexts, a stability of personality, an enduring set of motivations to seek liberty and order, and a nature comprising instincts and reason that can make him autonomous, self-sufficing. At the risk of overemphasis I reiterate -- the fact of man's a priori socialization and the experiences of the isolate demonstrate conclusively that this notion of an autonomous "self" is as essentially false as the Nature-Society dichotomy of which it was begotten.
A wiser vision of man is needed -- perhaps this vision: That man has a socialized nature; that man can only find happiness through the right fulfilling of all his natural needs, needs which are mutually complimentary, mutually interdependent, and mutually counterbalancing -- each fulfilled natural need a good that makes it possible to seek the fulfillment of other needs; that possessing a social nature and needs that are mutually complimentary, interdependent and counterbalancing, our natural needs for the goods of association are integral to our happiness; that mutually complimentary, interdependent, and counterbalancing, every good sought is a good in part because it helps us to aid others to fulfill their natural needs; and, that this nexus with society created by every man's mutually complimentary, interdependent, and counter-balancing needs is the primary source of societal vitality and cohesiveness, benefiting the strong and the weak alike -- strengthening the weak, and stabilizing the strong through his attainment of Valued Place.
Without this wiser vision, and instead saddled with the corrosive rights formulation bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, it will likely be our fate to endure the dreary repetition of the decline and fall of another increasingly inhumane civilization, ours.

Whitefish, Montana -- November 2000

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