The Declaration of Independence provided justification for the sovereignty of the colonies by appealing to natural rights that should be afforded to all free people. While it describes a belief that a group of people can rely on their chosen government to ensure that some of their natural rights are protected, it does not go so far as to describe the entire spectrum of natural rights available. In fact, though it introduces 3 securable natural rights, it fails to address the majority of rights that all free human beings should be afforded as that was beyond the scope of what the document was written for. It was literally a way to describe the grievances we had against the King of Great Britain and establish some rhetoric in flowery language that justified our actions against the King while seeking our independence.
The 3 rights listed as part of the responsibility of government were only 3 ways in which our past government failed to support its people. There are numerous other ways that the government may have failed, but they are less likely to be justification for overthrowing the government. There are definitely other natural rights that could not be agreed upon and were therefore omitted. Ideals such as property ownership and safety are among some of the other rights that government should secure, but they lied outside of the scope of this document and its purpose. It is literally a series of complaints or charges against the King of Great Britain first and foremost. Then secondarily it provides justification in the abstract for our independence. Hence the name.
Why am I bringing this up on Tok-Bak?
I was swiping along in Tik Tok when I came across a passionate fellow talking politely and convincingly about the Declaration of Independence and why the introductory paragraph is so important in a modern context. His name on Tik Tok is @dariusibell and his video is linked below.
PREFACE
I first want to take this moment to state clearly that I appreciate Darius Bell and I am not trying to discourage him or to make any bad claims about him. He is polite and engaging and passionate about this subject. These are all things that I admire. He is a great content creator and this is a space to discuss our differing opinions. Absolutely no disrespect is intended by this post. I am grateful to have this discussion with him.
Intro
Darius quotes the following lines from the Declaration of Independence and claims that to understand the Constitution, you must first understand 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,…
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
To understand this passage, let’s break it into its components:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
This simply states that no proof of these concepts needs to be presented because all people would automatically, intrinsically agree with these ideas.
that all men are created equal
It is commonly accepted that the use of the term “men” during this time referred to humankind, not just males and certainly not just white males. It takes the risky stand that upon birth (creation), all humans are equal. Though they do not explicitly make this claim, it can be assumed that the equality to which all humans are created is in the eyes of their creator. In other words, God sees all people as equal upon creating them. Trying to support any other context in which all people are created equal or should be considered equal fails to account for people born with disabilities, deformed, having only a short time to live, or mentally, or developmentally deficient to name a few. Any context in which you would like to claim that in the eyes of men, all new humans are equal would have to account for these humans that by society’s view are anything but equal. This contextual equality is expanded in the next phrase.
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights
This is a qualifying statement that describes the set of characteristics that qualify equality. In other words, upon being born, all people are given certain rights that are equally afforded to all human beings, called unalienable Rights. The problem, of course with this notion, is that before we had societal structures that articulated these Rights for us, the list of “unalienable Rights” was significantly smaller and likely only included things like the right to breathe, to consume food, to grow, to live, etc. It could be argued that the right to kill animals was a natural right afforded to humans given the biblical claims that man was given dominion over the beasts. But there was nothing that guaranteed these rights to you–there were no natural rights that the Creator defined. All rights are defined by those who agree to them and all rights are given by society. And even then, those rights are suspendible for the benefit of the society if necessary, so unalienable is a bit of a hyperbole that is unfounded logically, but nonetheless, we can move one.
Regardless, this run-on sentence continues by delving into some of the unalienable rights afforded to people by their creator.
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Now, we have 3 explicit natural and unalienable rights which ought to be afforded to all humans upon being born. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. All of these concepts are extremely symbolic and difficult to describe without context, but that is to be expected because the goal of this document was not to discuss these concepts, but rather to air grievances against the King as justification for our independence.
Life, at least seems the most reasonable. Being born grants you the right to live. However, being born alone does not guarantee you the right to live. Being born deformed often denied you the right to live as societies would discard deformed or unviable babies. Being born in the wrong place at the wrong time could result in your untimely death. Heck, being born at all was a miracle as the rate of fetal and maternal death was outrageous at the time. So while this is a nice sentiment, it fails to articulate reality for the newly created. It’s hyperbole and philosophy, not literal.
Liberty, however, doesn’t make sense in any context before societies were formed, when humans had the ultimate form of liberty. It wasn’t until humans began to work together that they became obligated to each other despite their right to liberty. When participating in a relationship with another human being, your right to liberty is mitigated by your promise to sacrifice your own liberty for the protection that having an agreement provides. We found out quickly that those who allowed their natural liberty to be given qualifications in exchange for defense or cooperation had an evolutionary advantage not afforded to those whose liberty is unchecked. So Liberty is contentious in this abstract sense, but in the context of a declaring justification for your independence as a colony or collection of colonies, it makes more sense.
The pursuit of Happiness is by far the most abstract right articulated by our forefathers when trying to justify our independence. With no way to define happiness in a way that satisfies every person, they knew that this was a poor choice to add. In the original draft of this document as well as other state-level constitutions, the pursuit of happiness is replaced by the natural right to own property. Again, this last concept is more about metaphoric freedom and happiness than it is about a quantifiable or measurable aspect of human life. To wit, for some, surviving would qualify for happiness, while for others, having a thriving plantation with a thousand slaves might qualify for happiness. Surely the forefathers do not mean that each individual should be granted the right to their own pursuit if such a pursuit violates others.
What is most important about these three supposed natural rights is that they represent the three most applicable rights to justify our independence. Leaving out the natural right to own property shows that the founding fathers believed that we had other natural rights that could be used to justify independence, but chose these three abstract rights as their hill to defend our sovereignty on.
That to secure these rights,
Here, there seems to be some confusion as to which rights the founders were referring. From my understanding of your perspective, they somehow weren’t articulating rights (like the three they had just outlined), but rather were simply declaring that some undisclosed collection of rights was supposed to be secured. Hopefully, you can see that the hyphen ensures a connection between the three rights defined in the sentence before. The emphasis in this statement was “that to secure THESE rights,” meaning the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness were to be secured.
Governments are instituted among Men
This defines the group of people that are designated to secure the rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness. This is their belief that mankind creates a government that is charged with securing at the very least, these three rights for their people.
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
This line simply justifies the powers of the government to secure Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness for those people governed by said government.
Don’t stop here
In a prudent analysis of this document, you must consider the next two major claims. As with every sentence prior, this next part articulates more specifically the reasons why these abstract beliefs are important to their situation.
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 only reason that the previous 3 rights were defined along with the duty of a government to secure these rights–justified by the support of the governed is that it lays the foundation for the laundry list of complaints listed that justify our goal to be independent from England.
This phrase explains how whenever a government works against these three Rights should be overthrown. In fact, the governed are obligated, upon being denied these three basic rights, to overthrow the government and install a new government. They should do so to protect the original 3 declared rights as well as a new previously unmentioned right to Safety.
It gets a little murky to continue, but for thoroughness, let’s at least finish out the first paragraph of this long document.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Having laid down the justification for their actions, they seek to describe a set of conditions that clarify the need, or rather the obligation of governed people to overthrow their government and to defend their new government.
From this point until the final paragraph, the Declaration of Independence outlines all of the ways that the King of Great Britain violated these rights and others, obligating them to seek their own independence. To be clear, this document is mostly about complaining about their former ruler and using those complaints to justify establishing their own government in the hopes of better securing the three (or four) rights indicated previously.
I would like to be clear that had they felt that the King of Great Britain had violated other natural rights that governments ought not to violate, they would have declared them. The fact that they didn’t declare all of the rights available to the people was because their complaints all fell within the abstract bounds of these three, self-evident laws of nature. Undoubtedly, if they wanted to articulate the sum total number of rights for a government, they would create a separate document that detailed such things. Perhaps, a Constitution or something similar would work.
It is inappropriate to assume that this letter, written to justify our independence, is the foundation for a system of beliefs that extends past their narrow usage unless our Constitution fails to support these rights.
Your Claims and Emphasis:
The Phrase “All men are created equal” refers to all mankind regardless of race or gender or age (boy or girl?).
You failed to mention viability, health, intellect, emotional stability, or function and seem to think that all men are created equal is a term that describes society’s view of newborns. We know as a matter of fact, that there is only one possible context in which all humans are created equal–that’s in the eyes of their creator as described in the next phrase of the same document. Historically, babies that came into the world deformed were discarded by some cultures. Deformed, crippled, mentally unstable, developmentally disabled humans have never been considered “equal” except in the eyes of their creator.
To be honest, this is your attempt to toe the line of trendy wokesters who wish to point out that all men included black men. Of course, it included black humans. Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves but had a black family that he loved, wrote the first draft of the document. In the first draft, there were numerous citations of the immorality of slavery, but those had to be removed to get all 13 colonies to sign. Regardless, by including this phrase the way it was written, Jefferson laid the foundation for the emancipation of those enslaved. Without it being written the way that it was, justification would not exist under the constitution. This is something to be thankful for, not to decry as American hypocrisy–it’s what ensured the freedom of enslaved Africans. And the majority of the population of the United States upon its creation supported the literal belief that all humans are created equal, most of the population was against slavery. The problem was that the sparsely populated Southern states had the money and textiles we thought we needed to unite. We compromised the majority belief in the abolition of slavery in order to provide for the common benefit that having the southern states included in the union would provide.
Creator–>people–>Government
The creator creates people. People create Governments. But the part you left out conveniently is that Government defines Citizens. By being a part of a society that is governed by a government, there are certain rights that you gain that may or may not correspond directly to your unalienable rights. The government maintains its right to define citizens by enabling the citizens to make changes to the government. The problem is not that the government is oppressing people, it’s that people have gotten lazy and have given the government the jurisdiction to protect all of us at the cost of some of us. With a country as huge and diverse as we are, there are bound to be conflicts. But it is unreasonable to say that we are being denied our life, liberty or our ability to pursue happiness because we have gotten fat and apathetic and allowed the government to be controlled by businesses rather than people.
The government is designed to protect your rights, it does not define your rights.
This is where you are mistaken. The government defines which of your rights it is responsible for securing. You have the right to life, but try living without a government…you wouldn’t be able to today. So the founders declared (only to support their independence) that a government’s role is to defend 3 of your rights. It defines them clearly as LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. It also tangentially refers to SAFETY and originally referred to OWNING PROPERTY. So we know that the founding fathers felt that there were a lot of rights that were unalienable, but that it was the Government’s minimal obligation to secure and defend these three to five rights. Period. This is only in the context of justifying the need for independence if we are honest about the goal of the document. It spends all but a few flowery run-on sentences describing the atrocities we faced under the King of Great Britain.
At no point does it limit the government to only addressing these three to five rights. At no point does it say that governments can’t define other rights. At no point does it give a comprehensive analysis of government responsibilities—it merely describes the reasons we had grievances against our last government. It justifies our desire to cut all ties with England and to secure the future of our own independence. They had plans for defining our rights more clearly in a document that wasn’t mostly a laundry list of grievances against the King. They would outline established rights under the constitution where they belong.
Government -> people -> Creator
So you use the Declaration of Independence, a document with the very specific purpose of outlining the justification for our independence, to claim that they didn’t want the government to define the rights afforded to the people by the government they created. Why would the founders want to limit the rights of a government that they were just about to create for themselves in a paper designed to justify why they overthrew their previous government? They don’t.
Regardless, you never support that claim. It’s not included in any of the text you copied and you don’t describe how it is that you think they came to that conclusion while mostly bitching about England. You have taken great liberty with this document and provided absolutely nothing to support your claims. There is a great sense of humility as they state that the 13 colonies patiently endured the suffering of King’s rule, but they never make any claims about how dangerous it is to trust a government because it is imperfect like the people who created it. It never comes close.
The closest you could possibly get to that kind of statement is when they say, based on their present experience in justifying their overthrowing of the government, that IF A GOVERNMENT fails to support these three (and a fourth, safety) things, the people should overthrow the government. That is the only acknowledgment of the imperfect nature of a government. Furthermore, it describes a remedy that ensures that people > government and not the other way around.
For your claim to hold water, a reasonable human from anywhere in the world should be able to listen to your grievances against your government in which you clearly outline how it is impossible to overthrow the tyranny of your current system. You would have to justify, as the founding fathers did, the claim that the people should overthrow their government. And keep in mind, it’s going to be much harder to do that since we share a country with them unlike England. Severing ties with our current government, justified or not, is not going to be easy and is likely to result in so much death and destruction that the small liberties you think you would be securing would be obliterated by the more pressing needs of survival as food supplies stopped, utilities stopped, internet and phone communications stopped. Literally, should you choose to do as our founding fathers did, you would kill off most of the people in this country. And after just a short period of time, there would be such a backlash that civil war would ensue. Which puts us in the perfect space to be taken over by a true despot like Putin or Xi.
Where does it say that they recognize that governments are prone to suffering from the same imperfections that people are? Where does it claim that governments are more important than the Creator? Using this document to support the idea that the founding fathers were intentionally not defining our rights is only reasonable considering this document was about the general concept that everyone should agree upon that justifies our independence. It does not limit the government and its role in any way other than to say that if the government fails to support these three fundamental principles, the people have the right to overthrow the government. To make your argument, you have to provide proof or justification as the founding fathers did in the Declaration of Independence, that it is failing to support your life, your liberty, and your pursuit of happiness. You have done none of that, so your claims are literally unfounded.
I encourage you to go back through your video and outline it the way that I have. See if you can find support for your claims that you may not have mentioned. I have no doubt that you believe what you are saying, but I am afraid you have misinterpreted both the goal of the Declaration of Independence, and the role of government in securing 3 clearly declared rights. Furthermore, I want you to consider that the founding fathers were about your age, they were young and living in much different times. The idea that we hold every word they used to such a high standard that we are willing to devote entire fields of study to them is elevating them to a status that denies their own human nature. They were not perfect and to use their words in explicit support for claims that are this esoteric in nature is demanding of them the perfection that would be hard for God to achieve, let alone a young, imperfect human surviving a war and harsh conditions in a foreign land.
If you would like to write a response to this post on this server, let me know. I would gladly welcome your input and will give you full privileges to contribute your response. This will likely remain a conversation between you and I as this is my server and I don’t promote it or advertise it. It’s still just a pet project that allows me to articulate my position on a Social Media post.
I respect your opinion and hope that you are not offended in any way by my analysis. I look forward to your reply if possible.
Thanks again, jase (aka Pork)