The Illusory Nature Of Rights.

Our rights only mean something if we behave as if they do.

Elephant handlers employ a pretty devious trick to prevent their elephants from running away. When they’re young, the handlers tie a rope around the elephant’s leg and tie the other end to a tree or a post that’s been driven deep into the ground. The young elephant will, of course, try to escape, but they’ll find that they can’t. After a while, whenever the rope is tied around the leg of the elephant, it will recognise that it can’t move freely, and so it stays put.

The interesting thing is that this continues to work long after the elephant is big and strong enough to uproot a tree. In fact, once the elephant has been trained in this way, the handler doesn’t even need to bother tying the other end of the rope to anything. The elephant is constrained by the idea that the rope represents.

It might not seem like it at first, but our rights operate in a similar way. When we’re young we learn what we are entitled to. We learn how we’re expected to treat others, and that they’re expected to treat us the same way in return. As we get older, we begin to believe that these rules are immutable. That they’re not the result of a fragile collective agreement, but that they’re tangible, immutable realities of our experience. This belief makes it tragically…