The great thing about the 'Net is that I don't need to have a wallful of encyclopedias...
...here's the relevant text from the Declaration of Independence.
>We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and
to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect
their Safety and Happiness. <
The reason I'm putting this up is that I want to underline how Preposterous all this sounded in the eighteenth century!
Inalienable rights.
Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
Mandate by the governed - with the ultimate power of revolution devolving to the citizenry.
To a Royalist of the time - there were truly preposterous, yea anarchic ideas. The Founders were being somewhere between cute and engaged in outright sophistry when they labeled these outrageous upstart ideas "self-evident truths".
Hey. It WAS a revolutionary document.
It did strike me that we tend to blindly swallow the premise of self-evident truth these days. Indoctrination, I guess. But think on this: when was the last time you had an inalienable right? My rights are alienable, all of'em. The state or any sufficiently lawless band can do nasty things to my life or liberty or my fitness to hold down a job.
So what's my point? "Sometimes we need to go back to the core texts, instead of relying on the currently popular weak extract thereof."
Imho if you want a good compilation of self-evident truths - blues lyrics are hard to beat :-) |
