This is meant as a brief addition to the points raised in my previous post. Please read that first. I’m only making this a new post to clarify a point that was raised to me just now and which doesn’t really fit in with the flow of the last post.
“Apex, how would you respond to someone who claims ‘I don’t believe in rights’ or ‘I don’t think rights exist’?”
This question is of course non-sensical. As we noted in the last post, a right is an instance of discriminating authority. And all aspects of politics are instances of discriminating authority. Hence why coercion is omnipresent and all politics are inherently authoritarian.
To say you “don’t believe in rights” or that you “don’t think rights exist” is to entirely miss the point. “Rights” exist in the sense that discriminating authority always exists within politics, which must exist when we have more than one person in a territory and these people have different values. These people have merely used another confused concept of “rights” in their anti-liberalism. They are simply saying they disagree with the particular expression of morality defended by a set of “rights”. These people also tend to be colloquial “authoritarians” (which could probably be better described as pro-centralized power, anti-delegated power, but this is going into another area of discussion I don’t have the time or space for here).
