The Best Kept Open Secret of Our Time: Individuals Have Power

“…Preserve what little independence, strength, and originality is left to the individual… raise him up vis-a-vis society: these seem to me the the primary goals of lawmakers in the age upon which we are just now embarking.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

“If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” – President Barack Obama, July 13, 2012

The age in which we live is an age of ever increasing tyranny over the mind, body and spirit of humanity. The individual human being is not to be trusted. The schools in which he is raised denies his parents the ability to decide what he eats while conditional self esteem is instilled until satisfaction and fulfillment only come with the praise of authority.

At its very beginning America was filled with individuals who sought to escape this grip of despotism. Hereditary titles and tyranny no longer held individuals in artificial societal cages, and people seeking a new life were bound only by limits to endurance and willpower. Intelligence, self respect and character were qualities that anyone could acquire, rising in the ranks of society.

“When hereditary wealth, class privilege and prerogatives of birth no longer exist and each person draws his strength only from himself, it becomes clear that… anything that serves to fortify, expand, or adorn the intellect immediately takes on great value.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

Elites recognized this new reality in America and actively sought to regulate the power and potential of individuals. Tools of control that worked under tyrannical forms of government were rendered useless. New, perhaps more subtle means of control needed to be devised. The state’s war against the individual expanded across all spectrum’s of society as the growing web of governmental rules and regulation made individuals timid and dependent.

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Permalink Reply by Nathan on November 19, 2012 at 9:49pm

The notion of “collective rights” (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that “rights” belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the “right” to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.

Nothing can ever justify or validate such a doctrine—and no one ever has. Like the altruist morality from which it is derived, this doctrine rests on mysticism: either on the old-fashioned mysticism of faith in supernatural edicts, like “The Divine Right of Kings”—or on the social mystique of modern collectivists who see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.

The amorality of that collectivist mystique is particularly obvious today in the issue of national rights.

A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens. A free nation—a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens—has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government. The government of such a nation is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of its citizens and has no rights other than the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific, delimited task (the task of protecting them from physical force, derived from their right of self-defense).

The citizens of a free nation may disagree about the specific legal procedures or methods of implementing their rights (which is a complex problem, the province of political science and of the philosophy of law), but they agree on the basic principle to be implemented: the principle of individual rights. When a country’s constitution places individual rights outside the reach of public authorities, the sphere of political power is severely delimited—and thus the citizens may, safely and properly, agree to abide by the decisions of a majority vote in this delimited sphere. The lives and property of minorities or dissenters are not at stake, are not subject to vote and are not endangered by any majority decision; no man or group holds a blank check on power over others. - Ayn Rand

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Permalink Reply by Tara on November 20, 2012 at 1:09am

"Individuals have power"... no truer words can be spoken. When humanity keeps relying on others to save them, heal them, teach them, free them, ectera... they remain powerless because they have given their power away, instead of embracing the power that lies within.