The Evolution of Human Government

70:9.1Na­ture con­fers no rights on man, only life and a world in which to live it. Na­ture does not even con­fer the right to live, as might be de­duced by con­sid­er­ing what would likely hap­pen if an un­armed man met a hun­gry tiger face to face in the prim­i­tive for­est. So­ci­ety’s prime gift to man is se­cu­rity.

70:9.2Grad­u­ally so­ci­ety as­serted its rights and, at the pres­ent time, they are:

70:9.31. As­sur­ance of food sup­ply.

70:9.42. Mil­i­tary de­fense—se­cu­rity through pre­pared­ness.

70:9.53. In­ter­nal peace preser­va­tion—pre­ven­tion of per­sonal vi­o­lence and so­cial dis­or­der.

70:9.64. Sex con­trol—mar­riage, the fam­ily in­sti­tu­tion.

70:9.75. Prop­erty—the right to own.

70:9.86. Fos­ter­ing of in­di­vid­ual and group com­pe­ti­tion.

70:9.97. Pro­vi­sion for ed­u­cat­ing and train­ing youth.

70:9.108. Pro­mo­tion of trade and com­merce—in­dus­trial de­vel­op­ment.

70:9.119. Im­prove­ment of la­bor con­di­tions and re­wards.

70:9.1210. The guar­an­tee of the free­dom of re­li­gious prac­tices to the end that all of these other so­cial ac­tiv­i­ties may be ex­alted by be­com­ing spir­i­tu­ally mo­ti­vated.

70:9.13When rights are old be­yond knowl­edge of ori­gin, they are of­ten called nat­u­ral rights. But hu­man rights are not re­ally nat­u­ral; they are en­tirely so­cial. They are rel­a­tive and ever chang­ing, be­ing no more than the rules of the game—rec­og­nized ad­just­ments of re­la­tions gov­ern­ing the ever-chang­ing phe­nom­ena of hu­man com­pe­ti­tion.

70:9.14What may be re­garded as right in one age may not be so re­garded in an­other. The sur­vival of large num­bers of de­fec­tives and de­gen­er­ates is not be­cause they have any nat­u­ral right thus to en­cum­ber twen­ti­eth-cen­tury civ­i­liza­tion, but sim­ply be­cause the so­ci­ety of the age, the mores, thus de­crees.

70:9.15Few hu­man rights were rec­og­nized in the Eu­ro­pean Mid­dle Ages; then ev­ery man be­longed to some­one else, and rights were only priv­i­leges or fa­vors granted by state or church. And the re­volt from this er­ror was equally er­ro­neous in that it led to the be­lief that all men are born equal.

70:9.16The weak and the in­fe­rior have al­ways con­tended for equal rights; they have al­ways in­sisted that the state com­pel the strong and su­pe­rior to sup­ply their wants and oth­er­wise make good those de­fi­cien­cies which all too of­ten are the nat­u­ral re­sult of their own in­dif­fer­ence and in­do­lence.

70:9.17But this equal­ity ideal is the child of civ­i­liza­tion; it is not found in na­ture. Even cul­ture it­self demon­strates con­clu­sively the in­her­ent in­equal­ity of men by their very un­equal ca­pac­ity there­for. The sud­den and nonevo­lu­tion­ary re­al­iza­tion of sup­posed nat­u­ral equal­ity would quickly throw civ­i­lized man back to the crude us­ages of prim­i­tive ages. So­ci­ety can­not of­fer equal rights to all, but it can prom­ise to ad­min­is­ter the vary­ing rights of each with fair­ness and eq­uity. It is the busi­ness and duty of so­ci­ety to pro­vide the child of na­ture with a fair and peace­ful op­por­tu­nity to pur­sue self-main­te­nance, par­tic­i­pate in self-per­pet­u­a­tion, while at the same time en­joy­ing some mea­sure of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion, the sum of all three con­sti­tut­ing hu­man hap­pi­ness.