Today, we're on our third of seven in the series on Freedom Principles.
In this broadcast, we look at the Fifth Citizen Mandate and Absolute Truth.
That is next.
Hey, welcome back to The Barry Ferrell Show.
I hope you're doing great.
There are seven citizen mandates that lay the foundation upon which freedom is built.
These mandates could certainly be called contract terms and conditions, but that doesn't quite
capture the force of keeping the government in its place.
I'm calling them citizen mandates to resurrect the concept that the government is supposed
to operate with some humility as the servant of the people.
In an era where obtuse mandates come from the government and oftentimes are arbitrarily
hurled upon us, we are well-served to reawaken our rights as a U.S. citizen.
The U.S. Constitution starts with, we the people, then it lays out the contract terms
in each article.
That document is a derivative of having thought through what the government of the people,
by the people, for the people should look like.
Now, it was not perfect.
Self-interest prevented the Declaration's first drafts to succeed.
Those first drafts would have abolished slavery out the gate.
As a result, the U.S. Constitution embodied a compromise that did not comply with natural
law or natural rights, and it took a civil war and amendments to our Constitution to
remedy.
Yet, to build the three freedom pillars of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness, we must have a sturdy foundation.
And the foundation for freedom is the seven citizen mandates.
So far, we've looked at these four.
Government shall be limited.
Number two, government shall submit to the rule of law.
Number three, government shall apply all laws equally.
Number four, government shall protect the rights of the individual.
So have you ever wondered where the word draconian came from?
It came from a guy's name.
In 7 B.C., ancient Greece was at a breaking point, and I kind of get your frame of reference,
this is way before Socrates.
Athens had some really bad harvests and people were starving.
The working class was so in debt it was about to start a civil war.
Almost everything was being settled violently and all kinds of crime down at the basic shop
and farmer's market, basically lawless.
So in the year 620 B.C., the people of Athens hired a legal scholar named Draco to codify
a system of laws in an effort to make peace and restore order to Athens.
Draco's code was harsh, cruel, and overly severe, thus the word draconian.
And the new set of laws did virtually nothing to solve the social problems in Athens.
Draco's laws allowed the elites to remain in full control of the courts, so that gave
a small minority of the Athenian citizens the power to interpret the laws however they
wanted to in their own interests and change the rules whenever they wanted.
Well, that didn't end well.
So in less than 26 years, the Athenians tried to restore order for a second time by appointing
a well-known local citizen named Solon.
Now Solon first declared full amnesty for anyone who had been jailed, enslaved, or suffered
persecution under draconian rule.
He then rewrote the law to make it apply equally to everyone.
Without distinction of wealth, class, or even political position, Athens flourished.
When government treats people equally and obeys its own law, a city or a nation has
a better shot at success.
This can be proven empirically throughout history.
Ancient Greece, Rome, the British Empire, the Dutch Republic, and the U.S.
Both the growth and the decline of every nation can be traced to how equally they treated
the citizen and how well they obeyed their own laws.
This is one of the hundreds of examples from history that formed the thoughts of the founders
of the United States.
They believed, in absolute truth, that there is right and wrong.
For example, a thief is bad and gets punished.
A law-abiding producer is good and can live in peace.
In fact, the entire premise of the Declaration of Independence is that objective truth exists.
And that just like in nature, in matters of human freedom, you can discover it.
And the freedom principles for a people would need to be defined in terms of natural rights,
which is based on natural law.
The general argument goes like this.
Nature is bigger and larger than any one human.
But every human is part of nature.
Nature is rational.
It's discoverable.
You can observe how animals mate.
How leaves fall from their branches in the fall.
And you can determine how nature works.
Human nature contains moral and political truth and it can be known as well.
The founders agreed with the above logic.
According to natural law, all people have inherent rights conferred not by an act of
legislation but by God.
nature or reason. So you could have a vague belief in a Creator like Cicero
and still support natural law like he did. Or you could be a devout Christian like
the Apostle Paul and speak of the law of God written on everyone's heart.
Both believed in natural law. In fact, any
logical deist would argue with confidence about the absolute truth
of natural rights and natural law. A deist of the time just had a general belief in
a higher power but no precise belief in the God of the Bible, for example.
There was a wide range of personal spiritual or non-spiritual belief
that would unify around their support for natural law.
The founders were well-read. They knew that Aristotle, who lived from 384 to
322 BC, was one of the first to give
a working definition to an empirical way to assess politics.
Now, to be fair, Jewish law had, way before,
previously laid out some cogent arguments for innocent until proven
guilty,
checks and balances, due process, and much more. But that was part of the Torah
or the first books of the Old Testament, a religious sacred book.
There wasn't a separate branch of academic thought devoted
to the science of politics until Aristotle.
Aristotle believed the political truth that can be discovered by observation
and he called it political science. Augustine, who lived
much later, from 354 to 430 AD, this was
after the New Testament was canonized, and he was one of the most
influential Christian writers of the Middle Ages. And in his political science
discussion, he laid out the framework for government to be limited.
And the reason for that was due to nature. Naturally,
rulers tend, based on observation, toward control
and corruption. In other words, the nature of man when he is in power
was rarely benevolent. His argument
was really influential upon the founders of the US. He argued that rulers would
need a check
upon their power. This was also based on natural
law. There were other thinkers that disagreed,
like Machiavelli. He lived from 1429 to 1527.
But the founders thought that he was missing the mark, and people like him
were missing the mark.
He's famous for promoting the concept that the
end justifies the means. The ends justify the means. In other words,
governments can do evil things
as long as their outcome goal is justified.
Well, who gets to determine that? And how much of an evil thing can they do?
He argued for a heavy-handed ruler to keep all the little people in check.
Later regimes like Lenin's, Hitler's,
and Stalin's borrowed from Machiavellian political theory.
The founders of the US said, no thanks to that whole philosophical lineup.
The founders rather liked the way that John Locke
simplified the concept of natural law. The laws of nature and nature's God are
self-evident.
In other words, any honest person with observational and analytical skills,
especially if he has a belief in a creator,
will come to the same conclusion by logic. The founders also liked the
reality that it was non-sectarian.
We didn't want a church state. Those don't work out.
We were trying to start a nation based on universally,
or at least almost universally, accepted, absolute
truth. So, you could be a Jew,
a Christian, a Protestant, a Catholic, a Deist, or an agnostic, and you could all
agree
on natural rights. Even today there are distinct doctrinal differences between a
Catholic and a Protestant.
But they are both strongly in support of the right
to life. So, here's the deal. The natural state of
humans is that they should be free and treated with equal
value. So, the law should apply equally regardless of status. That was this whole
idea
that came from natural law. This was not an argument for
anarchy or complete license. It was just simply that one individual has an
obligation
to respect the rights of another individual. Seems pretty straightforward.
To Locke, this was absolutely true, and it was as absolutely true as
any of the laws of nature. So, what's a law of nature? A law of nature
is where, under stipulated conditions, there are some things that are just
universally found to be true. Gravity.
It's working. It always works in our atmosphere.
That's a law of nature. It's an absolute
truth. When something's testable and repeatable and
always true under the conditions, it qualifies
as a law of nature. The second law of thermodynamics is a law of nature.
When you've got a hot object and it's placed in contact with a cold object,
the heat always flows from the hotter object to the colder one.
It never goes the other way around. It never reverses itself. That's observably
and absolutely true.
It's a law of nature. So, John Locke argued that
any honest observer would agree that when one individual
gives another individual a right to life, liberty, or property,
that it's a natural right that is supported by the proof found
in the law of nature. So, you have a natural right if you're a human,
period.
Political thought, natural law is a law of right or a law of justice.
So it's your natural right to have life.
It's your natural right to have liberty and it's your natural right to own your own property.
Those are the laws of right.
They are undeniable.
An example of a law of justice is that it's just to punish a thief.
Now why is it just to punish the thief?
Because he's violating someone's right to property.
It's also just to punish the guy who assaults you.
He violates your right to life.
It's just to punish the guy who interferes with your editorial.
He violates your right to liberty.
These are absolute truths.
They are observable.
And just as all honest observers can agree with the law of gravity, all honest thinkers
can read history, observe human behavior, and agree with the law of natural rights and
the law of justice.
So how do you make sure individuals respect the life, liberty, and property of other individuals?
This is the part of the limited job of government and it's expressed through a social contract
with government.
The people grant the government, by contract, the right to implement the laws of justice
and protect the laws of right.
Government can set up structures to establish an impartial way to arbitrate disputes and
redress grievances.
As long as government is doing that in a fair manner, it should be obeyed.
But Locke argued that if government's violating their social contract by threatening life
or interfering with the liberty or taking the property of innocent people, that government
should be swapped out for a better one that's more sensitive to protecting the natural rights
of each person.
Now, Locke lived in the day of kings and queens.
His essay was written in 1690.
He believed it was acceptable to overthrow a monarchy if they violated the right to life,
liberty, or property.
Locke wasn't a crazy anarchist.
You can't overthrow a government every time you don't get your way about a traffic light's
location.
Citizens are obligated to accept the decision of those whom they elect.
But the powers of the legislature are not absolute.
The law of nature remains as the permanent standard and a principle of protection against
arbitrary authority.
To this day, the United States Constitution is borrowed in many countries around the world
and the Declaration of Independence remains a great historical benchmark.
It's the first formal assertion by a forming nation that the people of that nation have
the right to be governed in accordance with natural law.
These are your natural rights.
In Locke's writings, he added an interesting dynamic to the right to property.
He essentially argued for economic freedom.
This natural right comes from the concept that you own yourself.
You own your own labor.
You aren't by birth obligated to work for your dad or for the king.
You can choose for whom you will work and you can choose what fields you will work in.
So if Locke were drawing up the contract terms with a government, he would add an economic
freedom term to the other four that we've already discussed.
But we're attempting to reawaken our internal freedom fortitude.
We're discussing these issues because we want the government to return to a more humble
view of itself and more regularly limit itself.
So we're calling these contract terms citizen mandates.
And in terms of citizen mandates, Locke would agree with the four previous mandates and
add a fifth.
Government shall be limited.
Government shall submit to the rule of law.
Government shall apply all laws equally.
Government shall protect the rights of the individual.
And government shall not interfere with your economic freedom.
Private property is personal to you.
You own your own labor.
That fifth mandate is a freedom economics lover's haven.
It's unambiguous.
And it drives the left nutso.
What causes the liberal left so much angst is that the term natural rights were dominant
among scholars until the late 19th century.
That's why they want to undo all that's connected to natural rights, faith, strong nuclear family,
clarity on identity, strong moral compass, respect for one another's life, liberty and
private property.
The problem for the liberal left is that natural rights are logical.
And what makes it even more threatening is that you don't even have to believe in the
God of the Bible, as I do, to agree.
Cicero didn't even know if he believed in a creator.
But the logic is even tighter if you do believe in a creator, a creator that creates all humans
with equal value, regardless of origin, makes it indisputable that they would all have equal
natural rights.
And if you take the biblical view, it's even more powerful.
Created in the image of God, able to create and develop and produce.
But way before the modern left pushed critical race theory and white fragility, there were
scholars who hated the concept of natural law.
They looked for alternative arguments.
And it became academia's goal to debunk natural law in the late 19th.
20th centuries. So what did these haters of natural law think about the right to
life or the right to liberty or the right to property
which became the pursuit of happiness? Well they said
and this is amazing, they said all those rights are not
and I quote, cognitively significant.
Wow. So this came from the mostly German scholars
they were mostly atheists. Natural law was too supportive of a belief in a
creator
and they wanted government large. They were Machiavellians
that the ends justified the means. Government would violate individual rights to
accomplish their endgame goal.
That's why today they will use any emergency to bypass rights.
The scholars who hated natural rights have a huge distaste
for any citizen mandate whereby the government is hired to serve
the citizen. And the US citizen mandate concept where government is hired to
protect
the natural rights of individuals threatens
their power over people. Some of these scholars were Marxists
and to them the only rights the individual had was to the society
at large. And maintaining society's rights for a Marxist
required a powerful central government. Some of these people were called
utilitarians. This is a
utilitarian view of rights. It operates under the guise of giving everyone
at a lower income level some of the basic rights of those at a higher income
level
and it seems appealing when it's all dressed up. But it's ugly
in its implementation. This philosophical view
created the platform for stripping humans of their rights for the sake of
the government
and it resulted in horrible human rights violations.
Even the left-of-center economist blames this utilitarian view and the
Machiavellian ends justify the means philosophy
of government for the atrocities of the Red Terror
in Lenin's Russia, the Great Purge by Stalin,
the six million exterminated in the Holocaust in Hitler's Nazi Germany,
the tens of millions slaughtered in Mao's Cultural Revolution in China,
the killing fields of the Cambodia genocide, the genocide in Bosnia,
Herzegovina, Rwanda, and recently in Darfur.
These all result when government has too much
control. And when government thinks that its
ends justify the means, the means are always
going to end up being a violation of one or all three
of the freedom rights. The natural rights
we earn by birth. So previous to these atrocities
scholars like Bentham and Hume, when they were just thinking about it and trying to
attack it,
they were ambitiously trying to debunk natural
rights. They were afraid, and I quote here,
of the monstrous fiction of human
equality, quote-unquote. Can you believe that?
They did not believe that humans are created and they didn't believe that
they had equal value.
The problem with natural rights was
not its logic. In fact, they skip past foundational flaws
to make the case for their argument. In fact, they almost just don't make any
sense when they try to attack natural law or natural rights on its merits.
No, when they attack it, they reveal their issue.
What is their issue? It gave too much power to the individual.
It gave the individual hope and instilled,
and again I quote, this is what they were saying,
false ideas, this is what natural rights did,
gave false ideas and vain expectations
into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life,
quote-unquote. They were all smug intellectuals.
They never worked with their hands, and they never wanted to lift someone out of
their lower economic status and give them the tools to move
upward. They just wanted to take from those who had more
and give to them. And they hated God,
the whole idea of God, or even the idea of anything
absolute. What they say in their writings is that you can't control people if they
believe that they are born with rights,
especially protective rights to your life, or expressive rights
to your liberty, or aspirational rights
to your pursuit of happiness. So pushed against the wall by empirical evidence,
where we show all the millions who die these horrible deaths when a government
has too much power,
even many utilitarian scholars today
accept that if the right is a human right, it's universal
in character. So now, even though they don't believe that person was
created in the image of God, they agree with natural
law in this way. They agree that all human beings everywhere
have equal access to those rights, if it's determined to be a human right.
This is without regard to merit or need. It's simply the rights you have
because you're human. So next time you're in a discussion with someone spouting
leftist leanings, you might ask them, which human beings
are not fully human? And what makes us
human. Natural law says that we're all
equally human. Most believe, including
all the US founders, that we are equally human because we have the same Creator.
But even if you don't believe that, you can observe that humans are distinct
from other animals.
Humans have reason, free will. They're not just driven by instinct and appetite.
We're capable of making choices according to reason, and we have a legit
basis for being treated equally.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Bacon and Locke made the case that
natural law was empirically true. You could prove it.
The argument goes like this. Before there was ever a government,
humans existed in a state of nature. And in the state of nature,
every human wants other humans to treat him with respect,
not harass or injure him, the right to life,
not arbitrarily rule over him,
the right to liberty, and not steal from him,
the right to property. So government is given a social contract to protect these
rights.
But the rights themselves are wholly owned by the individual.
And that's a conception. What makes this so compelling is it has
no denominational dogma. The founders were working with
undisputed rights. They were inalienable.
They were absolutely true. Thomas Jefferson studied Locke and Monesquieu
and Bacon.
When he drafted the Declaration, he simply gave poetic eloquence
to the ideas of natural law. And the foundation of natural law continued.
In de Lafayette's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789,
he said that men are born and remain free and equal
in rights, and that the aim of the political association
is the preservation of the natural and
imprescriptible rights of man.
So natural law is true. And with natural law being proven
by any honest observer, we have our fifth
citizen mandate that comes from Locke. Government shall not interfere
with your economic freedom. Private property is personal to you.
You own your own labor. This mandate not only gets us five-sevenths of the way
through the foundation for the freedom pillars,
it also links to the case for the third pillar of freedom.
The natural right of private property was transformed to a bigger idea,
the idea of the pursuit of happiness. It's a very
aspirational pillar of freedom. We'll look at that
in detail in our final on the series. It's unique on the earth and it built the
concept of the American dream.
For now, we have established the case for natural law
and natural rights. They are absolutely and observably true.
You can empirically prove them and you have
the natural right to your own labor. Your citizen mandate
is clear. Government, keep your hands off
of my economic freedom. Next week, we're gonna look at
the Declaration of Independence and the final two citizen mandates that
established the foundation for freedom rights. The three freedom pillars
were not frivolously derived to your freedom.
God bless you.
Hi, I'm David Farah. Thank you for listening to my dad's podcast,
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