Resistance to tyranny may take the form of exercising the people’s right to overthrow a tyrannical government.
There is a political philosophy that holds that the people have an actual right of revolution, and even a responsibility to overthrow a ruler that is tyrannical, or a government that is not in the people’s best interests. People around the world feel they have a right to government without tyranny. In such a system, each branch of government keeps the other branches in check, with no one branch wielding too much power.Īlso, allowing the government leaders to simply appoint whoever they like to governmental positions without allowing its citizens to vote for them does not give the citizens a fair opportunity, which may make them feel as though their rights are being neglected or abused. The best way to avoid tyranny is to implement a governmental system of checks and balances, similar to the one employed by the United States. When one person, or small group of people, has too much power, it becomes relatively easy to abuse it at the expense of innocent citizens. What this means is that, while citizens may feel like they have nothing to worry about with a less than competent leader, the opposite may, in fact, be true, and the situation may become dangerous very quickly. If you privatize meaning so that people get to follow their unrestrained desires, they immediately start tramping on one another, and public pressure grows for restrictive laws, like hate speech regulation, to keep things from getting out of control.In order to compensate for a lack of skill, a tyrannical ruler tends to make the government over which he presides increasingly severe. If you strip away all the communal commitments that help people govern themselves from within, then very soon you find you have to pass all sorts of laws to govern them from without. In fact, it leads to a big, intrusive state. You’d think it would lead to a very small state that would leave a lot of freedom for people. Which leads to the third big problem with the “mystery of life” passage. Most of us require communal patterns and shared cultural norms and certain enforced guardrails to help us restrain our desires and keep us free. They get enchained by their own selfishness, vanity and greed. People get enchained to alcohol, to drugs, to empty calories. The old philosophers realized that the first threat to liberty is actually the tyranny of our own desires. Moreover, we’re much more problematic creatures than Justice Kennedy’s sentence seems to acknowledge. The practical result, given this impossible task, is that most people wind up without a moral vocabulary, with only scattered shards of values, with no firm foundations for when times get tough. That’s something you have to do on your own. You wind up with a society in which the schools, the public culture, even the parents say: It’s not our job to instill a shared morality and worldview from scratch. If your name is Aristotle or Nietzsche, maybe you can do it, but for the rest of us it’s going to be tough. Wow! That requires a lot of background reading. Each of us has to define our own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The second problem is that Professor Kennedy gives us a homework assignment that almost none of us can actually fulfill.
There are no truths, only “concepts.” You define your concept of the meaning of the universe, and I define mine, and who are any of us to judge, let alone impinge upon, that of another? Furthermore, it’s a short road from getting to define your own truth to getting to define your own facts. The first problem with this definition of freedom is that it pushes society toward a tepid relativism. There is no sense that we are part of a common flow connecting the past, present and future instead, each of us creates our own worldview anew. Each person is a self-created choosing individual, pursuing individual desires. We are all monads who walk around with our own individual opinions about existence, meaning and the universe. There is no acknowledgment of the parts of ourselves that we don’t choose but inherit - family, race, social roles, historical legacies of oppression, our bodies, the habits that are handed down to us by our common culture. In this sentence, which became famous as the “mystery of life” passage, there is no sense that individuals are embedded in a social order. Justice Anthony Kennedy didn’t invent the shift from community to autonomy, but in 1992 he articulated it more crisply than anyone else: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
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