Rights, Obligations, Parasites, and Democracy

How the Right’s relentless, selfish focus on “rights” is destroying our democracy from the inside.

Everybody likes to be told they’re special. Everybody likes being told their needs are important, that they have rights, but nobody likes being reminded of their social obligations. In other words, everybody likes to be a bit selfish sometimes.

Which is fine, if that selfishness is balanced by pro-social behaviour. The danger arises when that balance is lost, because if all of us were only selfish, society would literally cease to exist.

A society based on no give and all take is obviously a nonsense; and if society truly broke down, many of us would die. The ones left alive certainly wouldn’t be sipping champagne on their luxury yachts.

Why, then, are the loudest promoters of selfishness—of take without give—the ones currently sipping champagne on luxury yachts?

There are three reasons: game theory, camouflage, and the destruction of democracy.

Game Theory

The simplest way to win at any game is to cheat. It works equally well for cards, Monopoly™, and society. It does rely, however, on most people still following the rules.

If everybody cheats—if everyone is selfish—then the game dissolves into anarchy, and everybody loses, but so long as rule-followers outnumber cheaters, then cheaters win and rule-followers lose.

Lying politicians win, cheating businesses win, selfish people win. Rule-followers lose, and fund the cheaters’ winnings—if the cheaters get away with it.

Camouflage

By definition and by common sense, cheating and selfish behaviour are anti-social. If they’re detected and exposed, then society rejects or sanctions them because they’re corrosive and dangerous to society.

And without society, we’re all dead, remember.

So how do cheats and liars avoid those sanctions? Two ways: the first, obvious one is “by not getting caught”; the second, more subtle, is “by making cheating socially acceptable”.

That is, by convincing rule-followers that selfishness is a virtue, that selfish behaviour is acceptable, that selfish behaviour is a right.

Seen in the harsh light of day, it sounds ridiculous, but that’s all that every selfish con boils down to: convincing people that their “rights” as an individual are more important than the society they rely on for their existence, and that those “rights” exist without any matching obligations.

It’s not as hard as it sounds, because most of us take the society we live in for granted. It’s like fish and water, it’s there from birth, surrounding us and supporting us and intrinsic to our existence—and hence invisible. Our own personal needs, however, are very real. So all the cheats and liars need do is focus on our selfish needs.

Tell us that life is a jungle, that we’re all predators, that it’s kill or be killed, that social conventions are an infringement on “muh rights”. Tell us that selfishness is normal, natural, and acceptable, and that society owes us what we can take while we owe it nothing in return. Tell us about “muh rights”, but never “muh obligations”.

If you can convince people of that, the parasite’s fundamental strategy becomes acceptable. In fact, it becomes laudable.

Enter the “successful” oligarch, selfishness personified. It’s a measure of the success of their propaganda that instead of being reviled, completely selfish people are seen as desirable.

Again, common sense tells us that everyone can’t be a billionaire, and billionaires can only exist because most people aren’t and can’t be; but so long as everybody wants to be a billionaire, so long as everybody thinks that billionaires—that selfishness—is socially acceptable, the few that exist have succeeded with their camouflage.

Even so, most ecosystems can tolerate a few parasites. The problem is that these parasites want to destroy the current ecosystem.

Destroying Democracy

A society doesn’t have to be a democracy. Selfish people can, and do, happily exist in undemocratic societies, ones where the rules have changed to permit or even enforce selfish behaviour—but not by everybody.

The same truth still applies in those societies: if everyone is selfish, the society ceases to exist. The only viable societies are ones in which not everyone is selfish—but democracy isn’t the only possibility.

So here’s the question: hands up who wants to live in a democracy, a society where everybody’s vote is equal?

All the dictators’, billionaires’ and psychopaths’ hands are down; or rather, they’re up, until they become dictators or billionaires. Until then, they’ll lie about it.

Until then they’ll preach the gospel of selfishness, because a democracy is the least convenient society in which to be a parasite, and they’d happily see it destroyed.

One of the more dangerous misconceptions held by citizens in a democracy is that everybody wants it to stay that way. Most dangerous is to believe politicians who lie about it, for precisely the reasons already explained. Few people would support a politician who forthrightly climbed on their soapbox and announced “I want to dismantle your system of government and put in place a power structure to enrich and advantage a select few, at the significant disadvantage of everyone else”. Or so you’d think.

Unfortunately, a lot of the same people willingly listen to and follow politicians or the media who speak to them beguilingly of their “rights”, and of the virtues of selfishness, apparently unable to join the dots and see the reductio ad absurdum conclusion of this hollow philosophy.

Because everybody likes to think they’re special; everybody likes being told their needs are important; nobody likes being told of their obligations, even though those obligations are the necessary and inevitable obverse of their “rights”. Neither exists without the other, but the selfish, lying cheats sing only about the virtues of selfishness and “muh rights”.

It’s the camouflage of the parasite, the siren song of the dictator-in-waiting, of people who have no qualms about exploiting and cheating others in order to satisfy their own selfishness and desire for power, regardless of the damage it does to democracy, or in many cases, because of the damage it does to democracy.

A society in which a significant minority has been convinced of the virtue of their selfishness, of the bizarre existence of “rights” without matching obligations—that society is ripe for the death of its democracy and the introduction of far more malign and unfair government, ushered in by the gullible and selfish.

The parades of anti-maskers, the loud proponents of “free speech” that has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with hatred, divisiveness, and control, these are the successes of decades of propaganda from media oligarchs and lying politicians who have told them over and over again that selfishness is good, that any demands on them by society are an infringement of their “rights”.

Without realizing it, these people have made their own society the enemy, the fundamental compacts of mutual obligation something to be torn down as infringing on “their rights”, not realizing that they’re hacking away at their own bodies.

The parasites have moved past making selfishness socially acceptable for camouflage, they’ve now moved on to using that selfishness to attack democracy from the inside.

The promoters of this behaviour aren’t just selfish or anti-social, they’re psychopaths. They know the fundamental paradox inside their philosophy, they know that the people who follow them do so to their own ultimate detriment, but that’s the psychopath’s advantage—they don’t care. They truly are predators hiding inside a social herd, parasites knowingly camouflaging themselves to blend in with their hosts, but only taking, never giving.

They’re enjoying considerable success right now, thanks to literally decades of propaganda and the relentless promotion of selfishness together with the disparagement of pro-social behaviour.

Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers are simply the most recent symptom of the parasites’ success in raising generations of people who are blind to society; blind to their obligations to the society without which they literally could not exist, and blind to the democracy that protects them, seeing only the selfish carrot of “their rights” dangled in front of them.

These demonstrators’ casual contempt for others’ welfare is bad enough, but the really ugly aspect of this deluded entitlement is its demonstration of the success of the selfish parasites. If they can scare a recently elected government away from acting in its citizen’s best interests simply by the threat of people unself-consciously and selfishly protesting their “rights”, then they’re not far from complete victory, and that spells the death of democracy.

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This essay is my most recent attempt to articulate the very real danger to democracy that’s posed by lying oligarchs of all stripes, particularly those in the media, and their faithful servants—the lying right-wing politicians. I’ve examined different aspects of this previously: right-wing politicians’ contempt for norms, conventions, even the law, in Scandal, Defiance, Rinse, Repeat – The Slow Death Of Our Democracy, the Left’s bizarre acceptance of the Right as good-faith opponents rather than deliberate wreckers of democracy, in Today’s Right Are Lying Cheats, the insidious reframing of our own society as the enemy, in The Invaluable Enemy and as one aspect of our current information and media landscape, the very long How To Drink From The Firehose.