Rights and Responsibilities and Law and Life

So... in the USA, the constitution (including the bill of rights and other amendments) are the basis of government. And in part this is the case because most people in the country get taught it growing up.

Of course there's also a growing history about how these things have been used and abused, though history itself is so huge that no one can know most of it.

Still, I have been thinking about the first and the second amendments in the bill of rights (popularly summarized as the right to free speech and the right to bear arms - though of course the actual text is different).

Now ... one thing is - rights are inherently self-limited. Rights come with responsibilities, and rights are based on individual choice. If enforced on everyone they cease to be rights and become requirements.

But choosing to not exercise rights also comes with responsibilities - sometimes heavier responsibilities.

Looking at original intent, these concepts of rights grew out of past abuses, where authorities attempted to enforce their opposite. So that is worth thinking about.

The whole point of the bill of rights is a part of an underlying theme in the structure of the constitution, which is "checks and balances".  And that's really an insane concept, when you think about it - in much the same way that responsibility is an insane concept. How does it make sense for a government to be designed to keep itself from being too powerful?

Well, the answer to this riddle has to do with time, and human nature.

We are inevitably all going to experience failure (and eventually: death), and the point is to moderate that. The point of government is to keep things down to a dull roar. But the goals and requirements of government are inherently contradictory.

So a system without checks and balances will have a tendency to overemphasize one aspect of those contradictions and then go off the rails and wipe itself out.




So... getting back to the right to free speech and the right to bear arms.

It seems to me that the sort of person who would deny others the right to bear arms is also the sort of person who would deny to others the right to bear arms. And this get that sort of person a temporary advantage. But at the same time this creates a government which is heading off the rails.

And that is what we have got, and that is what we are seeing, I think.

In one sense, everything looks great, but when we look at the statistics, we see plenty of long term trends which tell us the opposite. For example, we currently have a huge prison population in this country (though we are currently working on shrinking that). For example, we have people dying from a huge variety of diseases most of which could be prevented through better exercise, adequate nutrition, plenty of water, rest on a regular schedule. For example, we have a tremendous amount of effort going into medical care most of which demonstrably (looking at national statistics, again) has little to do with making people healthy.

Does this matter?

Maybe not?