What are rights? Rights are options that you are allowed to exercise without any barrier or any cost. Once a price is placed on an option, then your right is taken away because you can only exercise your right at a price. Sometimes, we are just not willing to pay that price.
If you are a citizen of a country, then you have the right to exercise your right, such as your right to exist as a human being, or your right to invest and do business and reap the fruit of your own labour. But if you can only exercise that right on condition, such as invest but you must give away some of your ownership for free or at a discount, then you are given the right to exercise your option at a price.
If you are a legitimate consumer who pays for a service, and if a service is provided supposed at a low price but with many restrictions that are being imposed on hindsight, such as in the case of cable TVs and LCCs, then I would say that you are being had.
In democracy, we exercise freedom of choice. We have the right to choose the way we live. We have the right to suffer our own errors. Let us make our own mistakes, and bugger those of you who would have the audacity to tell us what to do.
But if you restrict us from our right to exercise our options, then there is no deal. We would rather withdraw from a game where the rules are unfair, where the dice is loaded.
The problem with unfairness is that it deprives us of our right to pursue the straight and narrow path. Many of the things in society are borne out of correctness in our behaviour where we respect each other and we help each other.
One that straight backbone is broken, we become crooked. We think the only way to live is to be dishonest, to lie and to mistreat others.
Living a good life is afterall a matter of forming good habits - habits that are sustainable which ordinary folks say living a good life.
All our social mores are justified on the ground that "it is good for you," and that "this is the only way to be."
In times of structural change, the only way to survive is to change habits. We have to form a new way of living. We take ourselves out of our old comfort zone and establish new equilibrium states - new comfort zones.
For us to be entirely free, we pay no price for our options. Let there be competition so that we be rid of marauding sharks who pretend to be dolphins.
3 comments:
Good habits are easier to maintain from quiet enlightenment, the apex of which is accepting that there is cause-to-effect for every action taken by all individuals, in turn leading to cycles of causes-to-effects in society which aggregate to causes-and-effects in country before finding final release in the ocean of humanity.
A butterfly flutter in the Amazon jungle causes a storm in the Pacific Ocean.
Good deeds done habitually polish the path to quiet enlightenment, making it easier to remain equipoised regardless of what comes, what goes.
The bravest self-enlightenment to be welcomed in a single life is to be able to connect all of one's causes to all one's effects in the same lifetime, to be able to find inner evidence that what is sown will be what is reaped. Dry and stoic that may be, but better to have one drop of dry and stoic truth than a million gallons of man-made fancies all of which lead to dashed hopes, false pretenses, and the final emptiness of a repeated echo.
Within the unseen system of values, the book-keeping is precise and sure, the books balance, pacioli reigns.
That's why man suffers because to live he has to eat by taking away from something else, whether animal or vegetable, the very same reason which adds to his continuation, thereby deriving from the cause of his living the effect of disappointments and changes in it.
What choice have we got then?
did the world come about to answer that question for men, economists even?
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