I am still reading Auberon Herbert: Selected Writings from a Reluctant Anarchist, in fact I am still in the first essay, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and I am finding a great many passages that will likely make their way here in due time. One aspect I like of this essay is that it was largely written in the form of answering people’s questions and opposition to the idea that individuals should be left at liberty to do as the will so long as they allow other people the same right.

This particular quotation comes from his response to the claim that while “a majority [does not] have any rights over their fellow-men. Still it is convenient to place power in their hands, and convenient not to define that power, but to leave the matter to be decided by their good sense.” Herbert’s response to this first makes clear what this idea leads to.

You think it convenient that all the old rights, freedom to think, to speak, to act, to possess, to labor, or to rest, shall be enjoyed at the discretion of those who today or tomorrow may climb to power. If those who have so climbed look with favor upon these rights, well and good: let the people enjoy them. If they look on them with disfavor, as inconvenient to the social whole, let them be abandoned as fashions that have ceased to be.

When I read this I cannot help but think of the recent effort by the Senate to propose an amendment to the Constitution limiting the ability of the people to spend money to communicate and influence elections. They find it “inconvenient” that some people have “more” speech than others and thus it should be curtailed. If you read the amendment, the speech that can be curtailed is not just that of the rich, as those in favor of the amendment would have you believe, but anyone who the Congress might deem to be “inconvenient to the social whole.”

Herbert continues:

Everything that men have striven for and suffered for, generation after generation, everything that the noblest men have placed before life itself, is to count for nothing in our more enlightened age, if the majority of the day or the morrow think we can do better without it.

While Herbert was here speaking of rights, I cannot help but think of the crusade against fossil fuels and nuclear energy in favor of so-called “green energy.” Because those who have climbed to power have decided that “we can do better,” they are willing to turn their back on what allowed us to achieve the success that we have, never mind that in turning our back on these things will lead to massive loss of life as we lose the ability to sustain the productive capacity we currently enjoy.

I will finish this entry with one last bit from Herbert:

Please do not think that I am exaggerating in saying this. There cannot possibly be two supreme laws. Either the will of the majority or the rights of the individual are the highest law of our existence; one, whichever one it is to be, must yield in the presence of the other. Now the question is, which is to be supreme? Which is to give way?

One can only hope that we will answer this question in the manner that has allowed us to thrive beyond the wildest dreams of anyone living 250 years ago: in favor of individual rights.