Zdzisław Beksiński. Untitled, 1973
Certain strains of accelerationist anarchism, particularly those you find online, are just celebrating the oppression and death of minorities with a tacky veneer of “for the greater good” smeared over, change my mind.
The idea that there’s rights you’re entitled to just because you’re a human being who deserves a basic standard of decency from your fellow humans is not actually just made up nonsense.
Some bastard with a stick can pretend they’re revokable, but when the revolution comes for them, it’ll be their head on display in the public square as the people celebrate the triumph of their liberties over some warlord with a deficiency of moral character.
Yes even if they’re some faux intellectual who justified it with ass backwards “theory.”
Where do those rights stem from? If people suddenly accepted they didn’t exist would they still exist? Rights must be vigorously maintained.
They exist the same way hydrogen does. They are an inherent part of the universe, and all trying to break that does for you is blow up in your face.
You, just like the rest of us, are an infinitesimal speck of dust on a surface of an unremarkable ball of rock orbiting a star just like trillions of others, whose existence as a thinking entity will likely span less than 100 years out of the 100 trillion years that the universe will exist in a meaningful sense before the stars die and the last black holes evaporate.
The universe owes you nothing; human rights are nothing more than the common decency we owe one another in the face of an uncaring universe, and the idea that anybody other than the ruling class should even have them in any meaningful sense has a surprisingly short history. In contrast, the idea that might makes right is as old as the first predatory microbes. If a society believes in the value of human rights, it needs to be ready and able to vigorously defend them against would-be strongmen who don’t feel constrained by rules and norms of behavior, who will happily banish those rights back to the philosophical ether from which they came if it means they can secure more power and comfort for themselves.