Why do I think the question is important and timely? It’s timely because it’s the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence and we give special attention to the document every fifty years. Frankly, I think we ought to give special attention to the Declaration every time the subject of human rights is brought up in a conversation or a legal case. After all, the signers of the Declaration unanimously agreed that the purpose of establishing government is to secure the rights of the people. Here is what I consider to be the most important part of the Declaration’s text, one that changed my life in 1975, when, after many years, I reread the Declaration and, for the first time, I considered the significance of the highlighted portion:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Even with those good intentions, eleven years later a detour was taken on the path to hell. Hopefully it’s a long path (shortened by the actions of the current governmental administration) because eleven years later the Preamble to the Constitution stated that the reasons for establishing the Constitution were nationalistic.
Witness: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, Establish justice,insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
I suppose it’s understandable that for the representatives of 13 former colonies idealism took a back seat to the expression of unity in the face of the militaristic and territory-seeking appetites of Spain, France, and Great Britain. Result: Human rights were thrown under the carriage by the Constitution.
Those of you who may resent my civic sacrilege of the preceding sentence may argue that the Bill of Rights and the 14th and 15th amendments rectify the omissions of the 1787 Constitution. My first response is to point out is that, with the exception of some social (“Life”) rights in the Bill of Rights and the 14th and 15th amendments, two cultural (“Liberty”) rights of religious tolerance and freedom of speech, none of comprehensive rights of the Declaration of Independence have been added to the Constitution. There are no constitutional rights for many other social and cultural rights that remain unprotected and absolutely no protection nor mention of educational (“Pursuit of Happiness”) or safety (“Safety”) rights in the Constitution. Additionally, it is difficult to argue that the Constitution created a government based on securing the people’s rights when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution four years after its passage.
In today’s society, I cringe when I hear academics and political commentators refer to the rights of the Declaration as aspirations. Have they given any serious thought to the reality that we are born with certain unalienable rights and that it is the implementation and recognition of these rights which are the aspirations.
The question of whether there is a conspiracy to keep the people ignorant of human rights is important for several reasons. 1) The people are deprived of getting what they want from the government. 2) The “social contract” (an unwritten agreement between government and the people in which the people agree to give up some of their freedom and, in return, the government agrees to provide safety and order) would become an understanding in which the people would agree between themselves to secure and encourage all of their rights. 3) Government’s budget and its allocation of resources and funds would be based on the logical premise of allocating resources proportionately among human rights instead of a distribution of resources based on the opinions of lobbyists, the special interests of campaign donors, the susceptible members of Congress, and a politicized Supreme Court.
4) Human rights would be expanded to include more social, educational, cultural, and safety rights.
5) Human rights would be expanded to NGO’s, business, the environment, society, non-governmental culture, non-governmental education, and non-governmental health. You get the idea, don’t you? I am talking about societal transformation–an enlightened age–with full accessibility for everyone to all of their human rights.
Goodbye to the Age of Power
The accomplishment of what I have discussed in the preceding paragraph will provide motives for those in power to restrict human rights and remain in power. Let me digress for a moment with some astrological references. The last 2000 years have been called the Age of Pisces. (Remember those plastic silver fish on the backs of ’72 Dodge Darts and ‘76 Ford Pintos, to name a few (if you are under 50 and can’t possibly remember), indicating the car’s owner was a Christian? Well, Jesus in Greek was spelled ”Ixthus” which means fish. And the symbol for the Piscean Age was and is a fish.) The ideals of the prophet of love were given lots of lip service but the Piscean Age was dominated by powerful (“power”–3rd chakra consciousness) people who rarely made it up to fourth chakra, which is the consciousness of love. We are now transitioning from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age, which is a fifth chakra age, which is to be characterized by a strong and balanced intellect and the inclusiveness of love. It will be a marvelous 2000 years if the sidereal astrologers are right.
I’ll now get back to the idea of a conspiracy to prevent citizens from knowing about their human rights. Example #1. Our revolutionary founders believed that governments were “instituted” to secure the people’s rights. Well, if you were going to do that goal correctly, you would need to include all of the people’s rights and not leave any out. If even one right was excluded, those people who felt that a certain goal was left out would complain because their right would get no governmental attention or governmental resources applied to the missing right. That would create an imbalance and resentment from those people who believed that a certain right was excluded-especially if the exclusion affected their lives. This digression may cause you to wonder how it could be possible to create a consensus on a comprehensive body of rights. So, maybe that’s why we nor our politicians never seriously tried to have a government instituted to secure the people’s rights–even now at the beginning of an enlightened Age of Aquarius.
Another reason why there has never been a serious attempt to create a government based on human rights is because the social contract would change from one between the government and the people to one of people to people because a lot of people in power would lose that power. An agreement where people look after and support one another would create a fairer and truer democracy. It would be goodbye to the overwhelming influence of lobbyists, special interests, and a society where corporations are treated equally to humans and money is a form of free speech.
Defining Human Rights
It is logical to define a human right before we can establish a government based on human rights. So, I checked the definition of a human right to assist me in my quest to create a government whose foundation was a holistic and comprehensive body of rights. Here is some of what I found:
Merriam Webster dictionary: “Right. The ideal of what is just and good. Something to which one has a just claim. Something that one may properly expect as just and due.”
Dictionary.com: “Right. In accordance with what is good, proper or just. Right conduct. Synonyms: lawful, honest, fair, equitable.”
AI overview: “A right is a moral, proper, moral, legal, or ethical entitlement. It defines what a person is entitled to do or what is owed to them. When a person has a right,others or the government have a duty to respect it.”
Encyclopedia Britannica: “A human right is a fundamental universal entitlement or freedom that every person possesses sim-ly by being human and which governments and societies are expected to respect, protect, and refrain from violating.”
Merriam-Webster Dictionary: Human Right: A basic right such as the right to be treated well or the right to vote) that many societies believe every person should have.
AI overview: “The four pillars of human rights–frequently referenced in frameworks like the Universal Declaration of Rights (UDHR)–traditionally encompass Inalienable/Personal Rights, Civil Rights, Political Rights, and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.” ( I am not sure which rights are part of the four pillars and I will offer my more understandable version of the four pillars a little later in this blog.)
So much for finding a useful and consistent definition of a human right that could help me or anyone to find a holistic and comprehensive body of rights. Some of the definitions are so pathetic that they even use examples of human rights as part of the definition. Other definitions are so vague and generalized that they are also useless. Is it any wonder that we cannot create a comprehensive body of rights when we cannot offer a specific and understandable definition of one? Do we have to wait for another John Locke or Thomas Jefferson to even come close? We don’t have to feel powerless because not only do I have a useful and specific definition of a human right, but I have also created a holistic and comprehensive body of rights that can be applied to government, education, culture, and the institutions responsible for our safety. After all, I am not here just to whine about society’s flaws, but I have reasonable ideas that can actually improve the lives of everyone and I will explain how I came to have them so that the rationale behind them, although ancient in origin, makes sense.
But first, I will answer the question posed by the first question in the title of this essay. No, I don’t believe there is a conspiracy to keep the people ignorant of their human rights. My educated guess is that for an accumulation of reasons, there has been no serious effort made to suggest that we need to know more and understand the importance of human rights or to pose the issue of could and should our government be based on securing and encouraging human rights. There might as well have been such a conspiracy to keep the people ignorant of human rights because, with or without one, the result of people’s ignorance of human rights has been the same: We have denied ourselves and humanity awareness of and accessibility to our full range of human potential.
What We Can Do About the People’s Ignorance of Human Rights
If you are still reading this essay, keep on, because what I have written is unique and important and will not be revealed in any other source, including AI.
Back in the early seventies, following the demise of my first marriage, I became a participant in the Bay Area’s New Age movement, mostly centered around Berkeley and focused on synthesizing avant-garde psychology with Eastern wisdom and practices. During the course of my esoteric adventures, I was attracted to learning about the Upanishad-Hindu chakras and the Egyptian Tarot. I was a frequent visitor to the Montclair home of Harish Johari and his family for two years. Harish was a gifted intellectual who had been invited to the U.S. by Bruce Li and James Coburn to assist in an upcoming movie which would involve Harish’s knowledge of the seven chakras. The movie project aborted and Johari and his family(a wife and two young daughters) moved to Montclair, in the hills between Oakland and Berkeley.
Harish, who would later write a book on the chakras, often discussed them in quasi-salons following dinner at the Johari home. I learned that the chakras were seven levels of consciousness/desire and that all of human thinking and doing occured within one or more of the chakras. Harish opined that Americans were an influential and popular culture, predominantly a 3rd chakra (power) society.
Harish believed that the primary drive in human life was based on desire. So, I asked Harish why he equated consciousness with desire, and he responded: “Because we want something from everything of which we are conscious: to know, to use, to make money from, or, if human, to play with, to dominate, to love, to entertain, to teach, to learn from, to create with…you get the idea.”
“I get the idea.”
After that conversation, I began to look at life from the perspective of desire and discovered that I totally agreed with Harish: The primary drive in life is desire.
Harish and his family returned to India when his green card expired in 1974. Shortly after, I discovered that I was not through with my esoteric explorations.
My first live-together girlfriend after my marital demise, Ruth, called and asked me if I would be interested in carpooling to a five month class in the Egyptian Tarot from social anthropologist, Angie Arriens, in the Sunset District of San Francisco. I eagerly said that I would.
The most important knowledge,taught by priests to Egyptian royalty 3,000 years ago was the meaning of the swords, cups, wands and disks. The swords stand for the mental; cups symbolize the emotional; wands represent the creative; disks are surrogates for the physical. The elite Egyptians learned that humans are a composite of mental, emotional, creative, and physical attributes. I doubt that there has been a better definition of what is to be a human than what the Egyptians concluded 3,000 years ago.
Fast forward to 1975, when I began to look for a comprehensive body of rights that could be used as a foundation for a government whose purpose was to secure the rights of the people (paraphrasing the words of the Declaration). I realized it would not be enough for a government to just secure all of their rights but government also need to encourage those rights. To encourage the people’s rights would have a minimum of two requirements. First. Children in both private and public schools must be given a thorough education of their rights and given a thorough mental, physical, emotional, and creative education. Today’s public education emphasizes the mental and physical attributes and mostly ignores the emotional and creative attributes of the whole-brained self. There will be a necessity for a whole-brained education to get the most out of AI in order to have an improved ability to ask detailed and holistic questions and receive thorough, complex answers and to receive the same kinds of answers. Second. In the current system, when a complaint is brought against the government for violations of human rights, the government nearly always takes an adversarial stance. The system could be improved if the complaint, without cost to the complainer, were to be referred to an ombudsman or mediator in an attempt to mediate or settle the complaint justly and equitably without litigation.
When I reread the Declaration in 1975, I had an above average familiarity with the chakras and the tarot and a belief that life was based on desire. The chakras and the tarot are two systems of consciousness, but neither, alone, are complete. The chakras are too linear. When I describe a person being consumed with second chakra, do I mean physical, mental, creative, or emotional pleasure? The tarot is too generalized. For example,when I describe a writer as being too focused on the emotions, which level do I mean? 4th chakra (love, compassion, empathy) or 1st chakra (anger, fear, survival). I discovered that when I put the two systems together, creating a four-sided aerial view of a pyramid, I had created an organizational structure of consciousness which I named, The Paradigm of Consciousness and Desire.
To distinguish each chakra, I used the colors of the prism, in the same order that they appear in a rainbow. Using all of the colors of the prism was indicative of total inclusiveness, unlike LBGTQ symbols which have only six; omitting indigo blue. The seven chakras, from the outside to the center, beginning with red, are survival, pleasure, power, love, curiosity, free, and dream. The base of the pyramid consists of four flat-topped triangles: mental, physical, emotional, and creative. In the center of the aerial pyramid is a green diamond–symbolizing love. The entire pyramid is emblematic of the credo: Do what you will–with love.
From Individual Desire to Human Rights
During my exploration of the chakras, I discovered that each chakra contains 7 levels of desire or consciousness. This factor can be especially important when determining a budget or an educational curriculum. For example, take sex: 1st level (survival) sex is activity which reduces insecurity, tension, or anxiety. The prominent feature of 2nd level (play) sex for fun, delight, and entertainment. Third level (power) sex occurs when one dominates the other physically, emotionally, mentally, or any combination of the three. The dominant motive of fourth level (love) sex is the act of giving oneself completely to a partner without any special motive or interest in what one receives in return. Fifth level (curiosity) sex features a lover whose primary motive is to teach the partner about how to be a better, more sensitive lover and where then”student’ is curious and desires to learn. Sixth level (freedom) is featured by love or lovers who are especially creative and uninhibited sex. Seventh level (dream) sex is a more calculated sex which considers the consequences of the act and can result in pregnancy and children.
My search for the ultimate and important meaning of the four personality dimensions of the tarot took a different direction from the chakras. In searching for a definition of human rights,. I discovered the importance of what the Organization of American States declared in the preamble to the 1948 American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man.
“…the essential rights of man are not derived from the fact that he is a national of a certain state, but are based on attributes of his human personality.”
There were two elements of self-evident truths in that statement that struck me immediately. 1) Human rights are individual only. There are no group, corporate, territorial, or community rights–just individual rights.2) The ancient Egyptian four-fold characterization of humans was a foundational and holistic description of the human personality.
As I searched history, astrology, symbolism, and sociology for parallels to the tarot’s grouping of four, I discovered several. Here are many of them:
1) swords, discs, wands, cups; 2) air, earth, fire, wands, water; 3) Aquariius,Taurus, Leo, Scorpio; 4) human, bull, lion, eagle; 5) shaman, warrior, trickster, headman; 6) mental, physical, creative, emotional; 7) education, commerce, media, government: 8) pursuit of happiness, safety, liberty, life; 9) Educational Rights; Safety Rights; Cultural Rights; Social Rights.
When I reread the Declaration and had my human rights epiphany, I had already learned the basics of the chakras and tarot and had a belief that all of life was driven by choice and desire and a belief that two ancient systems of consciousness contained all that there was to be conscious of and desire.I also believed that there was no better social philosophy than to believe in striving for humanity’s happiness; which would be a state of being where all persons would be aware of and have accessibility to all of their human rights.
What We Can Do about thePeople’s Ignorance of Human Rights
Before I get to some solutions, I think it’s time to define what I mean by human rights. Surprise! Here is my definition of a human right so that we can have some clarity, consistency, and conviction about the subject of this essay:
Human rights are fundamental individual wants/desires of all humans which vest at birth and whose origins stem from commonly shared dominant personality attributes and whose societal recognition, implementation, and continuation depend on the protection and encouragement of government and its people.
Remember the words and spirit of the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution:
“The enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution shall not be construed to demean or disparage others, retained by the people.”
Remember that we have always retained all of our rights because we were born with them. They have never been aspirations; only the recognition, implementation, and encouragement of them have been aspirations. As citizens, we have not been aware of all of our human rights because of a society-wide unintentional awareness of what we were missing–but that will surely change.
As parents, and as lovers of children (and of each other), we can fight for a holistic and balanced lifetime public education so that we can live balanced mental, physical, emotional, and creative lives. As citizens, we can fight for having an Article Five Constitutional Convention, striving for, among other goals, inclusion in the Constitution of all of the rights of the Declaration, the creation of a “balanced budget” among our social, educational, cultural, and safety rights. We can also fight for a government that not only secures our rights, but encourages them. And, when we fight for all of our rights, remember that we are doing it for each one of us. So fight fairly, creatively, and fight lovingly.
Do what you will–with love.