The "New" Rights
Humanity is driven by the selfishness of few and the collaboration of many. Certainly everybody should know George Bernard Shaw's famous quotation, "All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself." For anything besides this to be the case, the comforts that are coveted by the selfish would be easily accessible by the lesser collaborators, for it's the nature of the reasonable man (or woman) to share. However, it's reasonable for the larger class of collaborators to be contented with their inequitably small piece of the pie as long as they have earned enough to meet their minimal requirements of comfort (food, shelter, leisure, etc).
However, there's a breaking point when the progress made by unreasonable men (and women) is so great that reasonable men are no longer needed to sustain it. This is, in fact, the goal of economy. Vis-a-vis: To make scarcity scarce. To live in a world where anybody can get whatever they'd want provided it doesn't sacrifice somebody else's natural rights (which are defined every once in a while by various organizations in order to assure the collaborator a minimum level of security that they can expect from the selfish). And while it might be a little confusing to consider, it's very easy to replace the collaborators (who require a percentage of the resources that need sharing) with machines (which only need to be manufactured once and maintained periodically). Suffice it to say, the collaborators end up going down the shit creek without a paddle.
But certainly that isn't going to happen because the collaborators are reasonable men and they REQUIRE reasonable outcomes. Also, the simple solution to the social contract between the reasonable and unreasonable man is packaged right there in the preceding paragraph: make Amendments to the natural rights of man. And this is the call for those Amendments... certainly in an age of telecommunications, space exploration, industrialization, and global warming there can be compromises struck between the selfish and the collaborators to balance the grand social order.
So before we go any further, I'd put it out there that everybody has a natural right to food and shelter in the modern world. Nobody should end up like this. Does anybody else have thoughts? Leave a comment.
