For the self-defense exponent, few things are as immediately irritating, illogical, exasperating, and enervating as an argument about self-defense. Martialists, who understand the realities of force and self-preservation, rightly believe there should be no argument. An aggressor who seeks to harm you without provocation and without justification — he who initiates force — is committing an immoral act, violating your sovereignty and granting you moral sanction to use force (preemptively or in retaliation) in order to eliminate the threat.While this is self-evident to any rational human being, it is anything but obvious to many members of contemporary society. Sadly, a significant number of these people exist within populations whose members should know better – martial artists, would-be combatives experts, some military personnel, and even some law enforcement officers. Invariably, these people — so many of them hopelessly ignorant of the ideas about which they speak — will turn to the concept of rights and twist it out of all recognition. In debating what is right and what is wrong, in arguing what should and should not be law, in debating what is justified and what is not, they will invoke that most miserable of misconceptions where your rights are concerned: the oxymoron of the “collective right.”
The rune “manu” or “manaz” means…
The Founding Fathers of the United States indicated their acceptance of, and based the United States Constitution on, the concept of natural rights. For the purposes of this discussion it doesn’t matter if you believe in God or not. Most deists or theists believe rights are God-granted, while others believe natural rights come from nature. (What matters is that you recognize natural rights exist.)
In order to discuss these concepts, we must first explore from where our natural rights stem. We must then try to understand what these rights truly are. We must couple our understanding of rights to the nature of survival and our long-term goals as mortal human beings. Finally, we must understand the implications of these concepts.
THE SOURCE OF RIGHTS
Because not everyone can agree on the Divine, I’ll approach the issue from a secular and atheistic standpoint. Your natural rights are a direct result, and the logical conclusion of, two different aspects of your being: the fact that you are a discrete biological entity and the fact that reason is your means of survival.
WE ARE ALL DISCRETE BIOLOGICAL ENTITIES
Because you are a discrete biological entity, you are an individual. There is no such thing as the collective; there are only quantities of individuals. Every group of people can be broken into individuals. No group of people can exist as a single living organism because they simply aren’t one, any more than a parking lot full of cars can be a single automobile.
Because no human can be another human, no one can live another’s life. By virtue of your nature as an individual, you are born with the inalienable property right to yourself as a person. This means that no human being has a claim on your time or your effort without your consent. Think about it. If you do not own you, who does? If you are anything but your own property, you belong to someone else, which makes you that someone’s slave. Are you a slave?
…”The Individual,” or “The True Self.”
Your property right to your person extends to a general right to possess legally-acquired property, for no human can exist without property of some kind. This is an axiom of existence; you cannot exist in space unconnected to all other existents, the sole resident of an empty bubble of space-time. This does not mean you have an automatic claim to someone else’s property by virtue of your need for it, however. This means that you have the right to possess property if you can indeed acquire it. Claims to the contrary made by Marxists, collectivists, and socialists of every stripe are empty. If you have no right to possess property once you have obtained it, those making this assertion must be making it naked while floating in empty rooms from which even air has been evacuated.
Let’s look at property, now. Most property today belongs to someone. Let’s say, however, that it did not; how do we go about obtaining property that does not yet belong to another person? Your property right to yourself and your effort can be used to obtain rights to real property (land). He who first “mingles his labor with the land” earns a property right to it. What of land (or other property, for that matter) whose acquisition is disputed as being illegitimate? The longer an illegitimate claim goes uncontested, the more the passage of time legitimizes it, because the passage of time increases the possibility that an attempt to correct the illegitimate acquisition would harm parties who themselves have acted in good faith and who have committed no immoral actions.
PROPERTY IS USE ACCESS
What is the alternative to this right to possess property if one can acquire it? What is a property right, anyway? A right to property is the right to its use. Because land is scarce — there is a finite quantity of it — some method must be used to determine who may use or possess the scarce commodity (be it land or any other item of property). If property belongs to no one, we have none, which contradicts the necessity of property. If we say all property belongs to everyone, we have a problem — because we would then only be able to use property with the mutual consent of every member of society. Because this is impossible, some delegation of humans within society would have to make this determination — and it would then be those people, not all the people, who hold the property right. Those who arbite access to a thing own that thing, regardless of lip service to the contrary.
This points to a critical issue concerning rights. Either you recognize that you have sole dominion over your person, as does each human, or you do not. If you do not, you are saying either that all of society — the Collective, the State, whomever — has first right to you as property, or that some other person does. Let’s take the latter first. I’m willing to bet that few people will admit to believing in Plato’s theory that a select Elite of societal guardians should have command over the rest of us. By what rationale does one human being presume to own another, when he cannot live that human’s life? By what rationale does a human initiate force against another? (We’ll get to that, too.)
As to the former, we run into the same problem of all humans belonging to the State as we do when all property belongs to the people as a collective. Because we cannot gain the mutual consent of all of society’s members in exercising property rights over the individual, we must choose a delegation of people to do this — and we’re back to the latter Platonic problem again.
These points touch on the rights conferred by your nature as a discrete biological entity. You have other rights that stem from the fact that reason is your means of survival.
REASON IS YOUR ONLY MEANS OF SURVIVAL
You have no choice but to use reason for long-term survival. To be a rational being is to embrace reason, the faculty that integrates the data of your senses into concepts, as your only means of knowledge. Only knowledge can provide you with the means to survive, for you are not born preprogrammed. You must choose to be rational, and as a result you are a creature of volitional consciousness. You may think there is some other means of knowledge, but this is not true. Psychic insight is unreliable. Religious revelation is similarly sketchy. Instinct tells you that you need certain things, but not specifically what they are or how to get them.
REFUSING TO INITIATE FORCE
Once you make the choice to be rational, you accept that you do not have the right to initiate force. All force has a physical component, but this does not mean all manifestations of force are some form of striking or restraining someone. Theft is force, because it deprives people of assets rightfully theirs. Fraud is force, because it is a form of theft. All manifestations of force are, essentially, the demand that a person act against his or her reason. Humans can resolve conflict in only two ways: reason or force, persuasion or coercion. If you cannot persuade someone through reason and you force them to comply with your wishes, you contradict the recognition of reason as your means of survival.
As a result, you cannot initiate force. To do so contradicts a fundamental principle of survival as a rational being — that reason is your means and your method. This action, the initiation of force, can also be coupled to our previous discussion on your biological nature. If you cannot live another person’s life, you cannot presume to force them to comply with your wishes. Your inalienable rights to your person and to the results of your labor are violated when force is initiated against you.
MORAL USE OF FORCE
Refusing to initiate force does not mean, of course, that you cannot use force morally in your defense. When force is initiated against you, there is no other recourse but to use force in response. By definition, you cannot reason with someone who has rejected reason. You must therefore respond in kind. Ideally, you must respond with superior force, though legally we are allowed only parity of force.
RETALIATORY, PREEMPTIVE FORCE
Retaliatory force may also be preemptive. The concept of preemptive, retaliatory force might sound contradictory, but it is not. In the presence of a credible threat of force, you are not obligated to permit that threat to be carried out before you react to it. You may, morally if not legally (for the courts may not necessarily support your actions in this regard), intercept and prevent the threat if a reasonable human being would conclude that force was imminent and harm was likely.
WHAT ARE YOUR NATURAL RIGHTS?
Now that we’ve discussed from where rights come, what are they? What is a right? A natural right is a right to action, not a claim to the assets, labor, or time of others. A free citizen has the natural right to pursue happiness and conduct his life as he sees fit provided his actions do not infringe on the same natural rights of others. (This is sometimes stated briefly as the idea, “Your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins.”)
Your rights are violated only when another person initiates some manifestation of force to prevent you from acting. Thus it is not true that you have a “right not to have force initiated against you.” Rather, you have a right to enjoy the product of your labors and you have a property right to your person. Any person who initiates force thus violates that right. This is not simply a semantic distinction; it is a substantive difference in tenor, character, and application. I cannot morally shoot you unless you have initiated force or its credible threat, because I do not have the right to take this action. This is not the same as saying that you have a right “not to be shot by me.” There’s a difference in character — the difference between the “positive” and “negative” conception of rights. The negative conception is that in which we understand our true natural rights — we must not interfere and we do not have the right to shoot someone down without justification. The positive conception is the one so many people apply incorrectly, believing they have some fictional right “not to be killed” — thus attempting to impose obligations on the rest of the natural world without the consent of any entities this world encompasses.
David Kelley, in his book A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State, described the difference in the context of Welfare programs and wealth transfers:
One person’s right always involves corresponding obligations on the part of others to respect it. The moral claim inherent in a right would be meaningless if no one were obliged to respect it. Liberty rights impose on other people the negative obligation not to interfere, not to restrain one forcibly from acting as he chooses. …In this framework, the positive obligation to provide another with a good or service arises only from one’s own consent or voluntary act. But welfare rights [and any other attempt to impose positive conceptions of rights on others, such as infringing on their rights to keep and bear arms in an effort to enforce your collective “right not to be shot”] impose on others positive obligations to which they did not consent and which cannot be traced to any voluntary act. If a person has a right to food, come what may, then someone else has an obligation to grow it… A welfare right is by nature a right to a guaranteed positive outcome that is not contingent on the success of one’s own efforts. It must therefore impose on those who can produce the goods the obligation to share them. [emphasis added]
A right is, by definition, unquestionable, and not dependent on some responsibility on your part. Many times, those who support some infringement on your natural rights will appeal to the idea that “With rights come responsibilities.” This is not true. A right carries with it no concomitant responsibility, because it is, by definition, inviolable. Responsibilities, by contrast, are accepted, not imposed. Others must respect your rights or act immorally; you accept no responsibilities in possessing those natural rights.THE “SOCIAL CONTRACT” AND RESPONSIBILITY
You are born into society accepting, by virtue of your existence, exactly one clause of the “social contract” — the agreement not to infringe on the natural rights of your fellow human beings. Humans who operate according to this guideline obtain what they require from other humans through exchange to mutual benefit. They are traders, giving value for value received. No human being has a claim to your life or your assets simply because you are born into his society. Your property rights to your person remain intact and inalienable regardless of the circumstances of your birth.
The price to remain within a given society is that you must accept responsibilities. These responsibilities correspond to the laws of that society. Either you abide by them, or you will be killed, cast out, or imprisoned — but in any case you will be a part of society no longer. Accepting the responsibilities that are the price to remain is not the same as blindly agreeing to any infringement on your property rights to your person. You can (and you must) speak out and work against the enacting of any law that violates your rights, such as compulsory national service or conscription, schemes for redistribution of wealth to achieve egalitarian ends, prohibition of civilian arms possession (which infringes on your right to preserve your person and thus violates your property right to yourself by making it more difficult for you to protect yourself), and so on. If laws violating your rights are passed, it is indeed your responsibility to comply or leave — but that does not make enacting those laws morally correct, nor does it mean that the “social contract” is the source of those claims on your person.
THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT
If we agree on what I’ve said up to now, particularly regarding the use of force and the inability of one human to live another human’s life, it stands to reason that government is evil. What is a government, after all, but a means to force humans within society to comply with certain demands? Government, however, is a necessary evil, because there is no other means to protect individual rights. (A society with no government whatsoever invariably devolves into feudal tribalism, which destroys individual rights by empowering mobs and eventually fostering warlords. The natural human reaction to a power vacuum is the creation of powerful entitites to impose order.)
That is the only legitimate role of government in a free society: the protection of individuals’ natural rights. That is why governments are instituted among human beings – or at least, that is why they should be.
THE NON-CONCEPT OF “COLLECTIVE RIGHTS”
Governments do not exist to protect the non-concept of “collective rights.” A right is a right to action — and only individual, mortal human beings are capable of volitional, goal-directed action. A government can no more take an action than can a corporation. Both are entitites (the corporation is a legal entity, a fictional person created for legal convenience) — but they exist only as concepts. Only the component parts of a government, a society, or a corporation can actually take action, and those component parts are individual humans. These individuals may indeed choose to act in cooperation, in concert, towards mutually accepted (or credibly dictated) goals. They cannot, however, truly be one entity. They will always be individuals and act individually, even if acting individually together. As Coach Scott Sonnon says of training, “We are all alone in this together.” The same idea applies to any group of individuals working towards common purposes for whatever reasons.
When some misguided individuals appeal to “collective rights” with regard to self-defense, they are invariably making a plea for the subordination of the individual to the collective, for the infringement of rights in exchange for something they identify incorrectly as a “greater good” or a “collective benefit.” These are the people who believe your “right not to be shot” or your right “not to be stabbed” justifies the prohibition of civilian arms. The problem is, you possess no such rights. No individual has the right to initiate force against you, but this is not the same as some universal, environmental guarantee that you will not face these conditions. To arrange the latter requires the wholesale infringement on the natural rights of your fellow citizens, presuming them all guilty before the fact and without trial (and without, in fact, any evidence of wrongdoing on their parts as individuals).
SUBORDINATING THE INDIVIDUAL TO THE STATE
This attempt to subordinate the individual to the State is the product of ignorance and illogic — specifically, a lack of understanding regarding (and the misconception of) the concept of rights. These same collectivists do believe they have a claim on the goods and services of others — that their needs constitute a valid claim on others’ efforts, others’ time, and others’ earnings. They make pleas to compassion and argue that the simple fact of your existence is an argument for its sustenance — without considering the implications of such a guarantee. If you indeed have a right to life (rather than a right to try to survive if you can manage it, without interference) then this is inviolable — and we must, as a society, take from producers and give to non-producers as a matter of course in order to keep you alive regardless of your efforts.
Think about the implications of such a process, such an institutionalized practice as part of a socialist or “communist” (which will always be, in effect, socialist) government — and even in our own American “mixed economy.” When you tell another that he must give up part of his earnings to support others (on the grounds of their needs as justified by “compassion” for those in need, for example), you are not allowing him a choice.
If I must pay confiscatory taxes that redistribute my earnings for the sake of some egalitarian social scheme, my government is using force — for when you take another man’s earnings without his consent (or you force him to “give” of those earnings against his will) you are asking him to act against his reason. You are, according to the definition we’ve explored, stealing from him, initiating force against him. Your theft of his earnings is never justified, regardless of the “collective rights” you invoke to rationalize it.
By the same token, if you invoke a fictional “collective right” in order to infringe on the individual right of self-defense, you are again engaging in morally bankrupt, intellectually flawed, socially unjustifiable thinking (and taking equally bankrupt, flawed, unjustifiable action). By infringing on another man’s right to defend himself — by prohibiting his possession of arms, by litigating his self-defense after the fact as happens so often in contemporary society, or by marginalizing him by registering his tools or his membership in self-defense organizations — you are subordinating his natural rights to the will of the collective, to the mob rule (or the oligarchy) of government duress. You are, in effect, telling him that his life is expendable according to the collective, that he is subordinate to that collective. You are substituting your demands, your initiation of force, for his rights. This is never justifiable morally (though it happens quite commonly in society).
Leonard Peikoff wrote a book called The Ominous Parallels in which he made the case that such subordination lays the philosophical foundation for tyranny and genocide. More importantly, he compared these philosophical precursors of Nazi Germany to the philosophical landscape in the modern, Western world, optimistically concluding that our own sense of individualism would prevent the same collapse into despotism and mass murder. Whether we can indeed escape the push to subordinate the individual to the collective and to that collective’s contrived “rights” remains to be seen.
THE SOUL OF TYRANNY WITHIN THE COLLECTIVE
Any man who would infringe on the inalienable, natural right to self-preservation is stating his desire to subordinate the individual to the collective. This may seem entirely reasonable if one accepts, incorrectly, the non-concept of “collective rights,” but we must see this philosophical choice through to its conclusion. In the place of the natural rights of the natural agent of goal-directed action and moral choice (a single human being), the collectivist puts the group. Because the group is not capable of collective action (only individual actions taken in concert), this subordination of the individual empowers the mob and, more accurately, the smaller group holding power over the mob. It is again the example of “community property” — of access rights to properly actually being held by the smaller group that adminsters access.
When you make this choice, you are elevating an individual or a group of individuals over another individual (the person whose rights are violated in the name of community benefit). By what right is this done? By what right is this force initiated and this theft made? There is none; there is no justification for it, though rationalizations abound.
No attempt to prohit civilian arms, to restrict morally justified self-defense, to subordinate the natural individual to the unnatural and contrived State (or to the unthinking and non-concept of the groupthinking mob) can be made on moral grounds. No infringement on natural rights can be made on the basis of some other kind of right — for there are no rights but those of the individual. There are no collectives in reality; there are only groups of people working together. When those groups work to steal from the individual, they have no moral grounds on which to do so — regardless of the shrill voices raised to trumpet mythical and misunderstood “collective rights.” When those groups work to kill the individual without provocation and without justification — when they initiate force by acting as the framework in which individuals commit unjustified violence — they do so illegitimately in the eyes of every rational, reasonable woman and man on the face of this planet. The sad fact that the irrational do not see their crimes — or worse, believe these acts to be just — does not change the nature of those crimes.
Self-defense is an individual right and, as such, is inviolable.