POSTHUMOUS PIECES : 46

The 'Rights of Man'

What is the truth concerning these 'Rights of Man' that I read so much about?
Is there any?

Is there any - what?
Truth.

Don't see how there could be, but is there?
Who gave Man anything of the kind?

I suppose some people would answer that it was God.
The evidence for such an origin comes from Man himself.

Then Man gives himself his rights?
Man sells his newspapers by telling himself day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, what a hero he is. You are enough of a psychologist to know the power of propaganda.

Then he is not a hero either?
In his own eyes he is, no doubt - by now - the hell of a hero.

And he has no rights?
Have other sentient beings any rights?

Not that I know of - unless it be the right to kill other sentient beings.
Very well, then; what rights can Man have that other sentient beings have not?

I cannot imagine any. But he exercises the right to kill, if right it be, in a more trigger-happy and wholesale manner than all the rest put together.
Does that distress you?

Yes, it does!
Then you are an ass! He does what he does, like the rest. Perhaps he has to. If you wish to blame him, his blame lies in his attempt to justify his abominations, not in the abominations themselves.

Then you agree that the 'Rights of Man' are all my eye?
I think too highly of your eye to agree. They are chemically-pure balderdash!

But seriously - technically - what are they?
Rights? What could they be but a legal fiction?

Why 'fiction'?
Why? Who could there be to have any?

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The question of whether you exist or do not exist does not arise: you are not there to do either.

There can be no question of whether an 'I' exists or does not exist: there is no kind of 'I' to have either positive or negative existence.

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