What does protesting accomplish besides acknowledge someone else’s power and author(ity) over us? From my understanding of US history, protesting is a relatively new form of expressing one’s frustration in the hopes that those who are watching are intimidated enough to listen to our pleas, but current politicians don’t serve us, rather they serve people way scarier than us. Is it really exercising our right to free speech to go to someone else’s house, business, or place of gathering to stand outside, shout, show signs, to get our point across to them? Will it really make them listen? To better understand the answer to this, we must first know what a right is, and who grants it to us.
A right is the claim we have to our property, our right to it, whether that property is our mind, our emotions, our body and behaviors, our personal effects, our children and animals, our business and labor, our money, transportation of our property, and our land. Our rights over our property end where another individual’s rights begin; we don’t have rights over another person or their property—only our own. This is why self-government is so important, as we are responsible for governing our property, and it all starts with our thinking. The United States of America was founded as a means for self-governing individuals to work together in a fair and harmonious way, and the US Bill of Rights was drafted to protect many, but does not list them all, of our rights to our property. If you read them, they are all related to our property rights in one way or another, and while the US Bill of Rights details a small list of our natural rights, it does not grant them to us, it merely protects our property from the government; this is why they are actually considered “Constitutionally protected rights” and not “Constitutional rights”, as “Constitutional rights” implies that the government granted them to us, which it didn’t, our creator did.
According to the US Bill of Rights, free speech is a right protected by the US Constitution, as is the freedom of the press, the freedom to peaceably gather together, the freedom to our own religious beliefs, and the freedom to defend our property, up to and including killing one who trespasses on our property. The second amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, secures all of the other rights through the use of physical force; if one is going to take responsibility for their natural rights to their property, they must have the means to secure those rights apart from government intervention. Basically, natural rights are an individual’s right to their own property, and speech is an outcome of thought, so if one is not able to speak freely, the implication is that they’re not able to think their thoughts freely either.
“If you can’t say what you think, soon you won’t be able to think.” ~Jordan Peterson
I’m not sure where the idea of government as an authority came from, but the word implies that those who are an authority are the authors of society, and more specifically, authors of each individual that consents to them as an author(ity). It implies that the authors get to write the story for our lives, of my life, but that is absolutely incorrect if it is not something that I have agreed to through tacit, implied, or explicit consent. There is no universal law that states that government is god and king over others, or that those who happen to be born in a specific region are beholden to their local government, because governments derives their power from the “consent of the governed”, and therefore have no absolute right outside of that consent. In fact, we have the natural right to return to the law of nature, to be governed by her universal laws, when the state imposes unjust laws, or even merely laws that we do not agree to.
Legibus sumptis desinentibus, lege nature utendum est. “When laws imposed by the state fail, we must act by the law of nature.” ~Black’s Law, 2nd Edition, 1910
Now that we understand that authority implies the ability to author our lives, or the lives of others, for example, minors under our care, what is an “appeal to authority”? Well, for one, it is a logical fallacy, also known as deceptive logic.
An appeal to authority logical fallacy is “insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered.” ~Logically Fallacious
When a government agency, politician of some sort, or branch of government says something is law, and is therefore legal and binding over us as individuals, are basically saying that it is true, aka a law, because they said so, and the weight of their office makes it so. To protest such laws and other abuses by government is to continue to consent to their status as an author(ity) over one’s life, even if one doesn’t consent to the new rule, this is why protesting is an appeal to authority. Conversely, natural law is considered law because it is based in reason, which is why it is also known as the “law of reason” and “universal law”—it applies everywhere for all people, regardless of social status, and whether they understand it or not. Most civil laws aren’t based on anything but the consent of the governed, and would not stand up without that consent. This begs the question, if civil law is founded upon the consent of the governed and not upon the law of reason, placing it in the realm of agreements rather than objective truth and morality, then how do we remove our consent from such systems? Can we do it as an individual, or must we do it as a collective group?
To withdraw consent from being governed externally, one must demonstrate the ability to self-govern. Internal monarchy (internal ruler) equates to external anarchy (no rulers), but internal anarchy (no ruler) will always equate to an external monarchy/oligarchy (external rulers). It’s really about cause and effect; govern yourself and you cannot be governed, but fail to govern yourself and you will be governed. The only valid form of withdrawing consent to being externally governed is to actually take responsibility and self-govern.
“It behooves us to remember that men can never escape being governed. Either they must govern themselves or they must submit to being governed by others. If from lawlessness or fickleness, from folly or self-indulgence, they refuse to govern themselves, then most assuredly in the end they will have to be governed from the outside. They can prevent the need of government from without only by showing that they possess the power of government from within. A sovereign cannot make excuses for his failures; a sovereign must accept the responsibility for the exercise of the power that inheres in him; and where, as is true in our Republic, the people are sovereign, then the people must show a sober understanding and a sane and steadfast purpose if they are to preserve that orderly liberty upon which as a foundation every republic must rest.” ~Teddy Roosevelt, At Jamestown Exposition, April 26, 1907., Mem. Ed. XII, 593; Nat. Ed. XI, 312.
“You cannot give self-government to anybody. He has got to earn it for himself. You can give him the chance to obtain self-government, but he himself out of his own heart must do the governing. He must govern himself. That is what it means. That is what self-government means. . . . There must be control. There must be mastery, somewhere, and if there is no self-control and self-mastery, the control and the mastery will ultimately be imposed from without.” ~Teddy Roosevelt, At University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 15, 1911., Mem. Ed. XV, 548; Nat. Ed. XIII, 594.
Instead of allowing others to be an author(ity) of our lives, dictating our story to us, it is far better to author our own lives and write our own story by taking responsibility for our thoughts, feelings and behaviors, including any positive or negative outcomes we might have. Power over others can be defined as “another person having something we want”, so if we stop looking outside of ourselves for things we want, such as liberty/freedom, and instead find it within, they lose all “power over us”. Protesting acknowledges their power over us, and that they have things we want from them, so I’d rather just realize they don’t have anything I want, because they don’t grant me my freedom or rights, our creator alone does that. Why would I appeal to another for something I already have within me? I wouldn’t, but if they choose to interfere with my individual right to direct my life as I see fit, by attempting to legislate away my rights to my property, and they take physical actions that threatens my right to govern my property, then it is my duty to use comparable means to secure my property from their aggression.
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