The notion that people have inalienable rights – the right to free speech and association, or the right not to be tortured – simply by virtue of their existence as human beings: that notion is, of course, a fiction. Actually people are merely sacks of meat on sticks. Such, it seems, is the ironclad certainty that grounds most tyrannies all over the world – anything their subjects are or have, they sustain or retain at the whim of the regime.
The notion that people have inalienable rights – the right to free speech and association, or the right not to be tortured – simply by virtue of their existence as human beings: that notion is, of course, a fiction. Actually people are merely sacks of meat on sticks. Such, it seems, is the ironclad certainty that grounds most tyrannies all over the world – anything their subjects are or have, they sustain or retain at the whim of the regime.