Somewhere recently, I came across an assertion that the problem with our modern culture is that it is obsessed with rights, whereas indigenous American tribal cultures emphasize obligations. I wish I had paid more attention at the time, but the idea stuck with me.

     I've been digging into this all day and traced these notions of civic obligation back to ancient Greece-and beyond. We did not bring the doctrine of selfishness with us from Europe. True, selfishness was on the rise in Europe during the Enlightenment. but traditions of the obligations of the wealthy and powerful have roots in earliest Greek culture. The idea of civic obligation is ancient, widespread wisdom that the USA seems to have turned away from.

     Even the Bible is clear on this. The Gospel of Luke says: "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded."

     We used to call this "noblesse oblige"-the idea that nobility (or success) carries an obligation to the community. The problem today is that we've treated it as "noblesse optional," and many of our most fortunate today decline the option. Decline the option and belittle those who see wisdom in it.

     When social pressure fails, we can use tools like progressive taxation and a social safety net to ensure the community stays whole. Modern selfishness calls this "theft." But that ignores the fact that no one becomes wealthy in a vacuum. We all use the same roads, the same legal system, and the same stable society.

     The notion of "makers and takers" is seriously flawed. The real makers are the people who get their hands dirty. True, entrepreneurs facilitate economic advancement. But they do not make anything. All the making is done by workers. Obama made a rare gaffe when he said, "You didn't make that!" He was wrong to imply that entrepreneurs contribute little, but his critics are wrong to imply entrepreneurs do it alone. What Obama was trying to get at is that entrepreneurs are claiming too much for themselves. They underpay labor, and forget that their success is built with the resources of the whole society, much of the infrastructure paid for with taxes.

     I've been contemplating this for 12 hours, but it feels like an assertion worthy of discussion and debate: A society obsessed only with what it is owed eventually loses its soul.

     Should we be reorienting ourselves toward civic responsibility and requiring more from those who have benefited most from our system?

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     My response:

       1.12.2 2025 December 21 - Rights vs. Obligation

   I saw a friend's post on Facebook, my social medium of choice these days. It suggests that better people in better times had better politics when they emphasized obligations rather than rights. Bloated with self-righteous sanctimony it might make a good point. I don't think so.

   First of all, I know of no piece exhorting better behavior suggesting the writer should do more so there rest of us can do less. I get it. You know the drill, "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country." On the other hand, the foundation of America is the preservation of our rights, our individuality, and our individual rights. In preserving these, Thomas Jefferson opined, we are creating the foundation for a better world. It certainly turned out that way for more than century, the wealthiest and most-powerful nation ever abolished slavery, expanded human dignity, and virtually eliminated the truly-poor underclass that characterized (and still characterizes) the rest of the world.

   To make it clear, these rights, enumerated by Jefferson as including life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness neither take goods or services or labor from other people nor imply any loss of responsibility. They only tell us that government may not, and, in a well-function world of decency cannot, tell us how to live, what to say, what to do, or what goals to have, until those impact others in a civil or criminal way.

   In addition to its religious and lifestyle messages, Judaism promotes charity as synonymous with justice, so it's important, eight levels of "Tzedakah." We are socially expected to contribute to the benefit of others, more than just the basic Jewish golden rule of loving thy neighbor as thyself. Christianity has warped these messages, but it still promotes being nice to people and helping those less fortunate. However, like most of religion's intrusion into politics, it doesn't work so well when the government gets into the religious-do-gooder business.

   The political manifestation of this message of rights yielding to obligation circa 1910 was called Progressivism. It said individual rights were not from something larger than government as Jefferson explained. It said our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are "obsolete." Rather those rights come from the government and what the government gives, of course, it can take away.

   The consequence of America's turn to Progressivism has been dire. I believe the Russian Revolution owes much of its success to American-Progressive support as do Hitler's National Socialism and Mao's Cultural Revolution. The cost of this pseudo-Marxist brand of socialism has been 262 million people killed by their own socialist governments. (2½% of that carnage is Hitler's Jewish Holocaust.) This is above and beyond the 110 million killed in wars, most of which would not have happened were it not for the push for socialism.

   I don't remember the Bible or any other source I respect commanding us to do good by living well ourselves and forcing others, usually less well off than ourselves, to give to help somebody else. That is the message of Progressivism and what we now call liberalism. That is the message of this Facebook post. Above and beyond its continuing message of denegrating the human spirit, this has been the message of the Democratic Party here in the United States.

   Rights reflect respect and dignity while obligation is Orwellian agony. The consequence of following the lead in this piece (or John Lennon's song "Imagine") is hundreds of millions of lives lost, one of twenty deaths in the past century.

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     My comments: I answered this pathetic post because the person posting it has name continuity with somebody I knew in graduate school forty-five years ago. I never would have engages with something this silly except for the expectation that there was some innate intelligence at the other end. That expecatation was from personal interactions forty-five years ago. I guess I got what I deserved.

     Perhaps this person even has biological continuity. Still, this is the same liberal tripe we see. What is clear is his answers don't seem to depend on what I actually said or what actually has happened. Alas, that's typical, he has his issues and responses already picked out, so he answers about poor people working hard and DEI when my discussion stream here mentioned neither.

     It quickly became clear to me that, like so many left-wing, Democrat, Progressive people, this fellow doesn't see language as a forum for communication.

     In the golden age of Walter-Cronkite journalism, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." So let me make some points from what actually happened in history.

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     Adam,

     Where do you get the notion that we must have either rights or obligations, but not both? I argue for both.

     If you're making the pitch for using physical force to take life, liberty, and property from a group of people to support another throughs some sort of obligation, then, clearly, the other group doesn't have those rights.

     Where did you see an assertion that the rich should do more so the poor can do less? I did not make such an assertion, and I see nothing in my musings to imply such an assertion.

     The whole message is one of insisting that those doing better be compelled to support those doing worse and government is a reasonable way of doing that.

     Our society has a distribution problem. Employees are at a negotiating disadvantage with employers, with the very visible consequence that employers allocate too large a share of the fruits of production to themselves, and too little to workers.

     The only problem I ever see here is the imbalance of individual employees negotiating with a big, bad company. There are institutions like unions that effect collective bargaining and, in more professional circles, the salary market does a damned good job of making sure individual workers get paid. Any concern over how much the Big Boys Up Top get paid is all about envy and jealousy, not my top priorities.

     There is, of course, no analytically "optimal" distribution. But we see an alarming concentration of wealth that is alarmingly increasing. Whatever "optimal" is, the current distribution of the fruits of production is clearly non-optimal, and getting worse.

     What on earth is an "optimal" distribution other than what a free, informed market creates? Having some coercive force in government making distribution "more optimal" is precisely the slippery slope to tyranny.

     Since you invoked the Founders, let me invoke their wisdom. The Founders distrusted concentrated power. They worked hard to design a system that would prevent, or at least inhibit, the concentration of political power. What they did not foresee is today's fantastic concentration of wealth and the attendant concentration of economic power. Should we not learn from their example?

     The American founders had no issue with people becoming very rich. The confusion between economic success and power is precisely the kind of language inability I alluded to earlier. So long as all my rights are maintained, then there is no reason a rich person somewhere else is a problem and I can stay away if I don't like it.

     By the way, the genius of the Founders was to give equal rights to all, replacing a system where only the aristocracy had rights. The Founders had no notion of removing the obligations that attach to wealth and privilege. They very much felt those obligations, and considered them a burden that they, the wealthy and privileged of the new nation, must bear.

     This is precisely the opposite of what they said and, I presume, of what they felt. This is the sort of language liquidity that scares me, typical of the American left in today's social media.

     A bit of economic history.

     -- We had the problem of excessively concentrated wealth in the Gilded Age. It brought the nation to economic ruin at the end of the 1920's.

     What brought the nation to economic ruin, say some economically-educated people I know, was government meddling with the banking system.

     -- The New Deal did much to repair the damage. The post-war extensions of the New Deal magnified the effect.

     The New Deal was the rampant expansion of government that froze the bad situation while imposing costs that made it worse. What ended the agony was a war that got people willing to work much harder for a lot less out of patriotism. A more-recent example was the 2001 tech-stock crises that got better in eighteen months without government intervention and the 2008 housing-bubble crisis that generated eight years of devastating government intervention including trillions of dollars transfered in TARP programs. The result of those programs was cutting median family net worth (a good measure of how the bottom half is doing) by 45%, almost half.

     -- Until 1980. The Reagan Revolution deliberately reversed much of the New Deal. And we slowly moved back toward the economic conditions of the Gilded Age, the conditions of today.

     Again, you have your own facts and then there's what actually happened. The rapid decline under President Carter slowed down enough that people came back to work. I recall 1977-1980 going to the grocery store and seeing higher prices on Wednesday than Monday and higher prices Friday than Wednesday. I also recall major construction projects all over the place when there finally was enough wealth in the American economy to fix broken roads and stuff.

     This is not economic theory. It is economic history.

     I'm sure it's somebody's idea of history, just not what happened. The next few paragraphs just repeat the same history that didn't happen. I have no idea what "Gilded Age" this person means, but higher wages and more prosperity at all class levels come from productivity, not from government tyranny.

     The USA in the Gilded Age had lost the power of strong social expectations to insist that the wealthy live up to the obligations that properly attach to wealth and privilege. The New Deal used various mechanisms to put some of those obligations into law.

     And it worked.

     This is how it worked when I was awake and watching. I'm looking specifically, as best I can, for how well the tenth percentile is doing, the people in the bottom 10% of the American economy.

     And the Reagan Revolution dismantled it, with increasingly dire consequences.

     The problem today is quite real. The potential for a new "crash" is very real.

     If you don't like the time-honored, worldwide solution of a system of obligation, what solution do you offer?

     How about American-Constitutional conservative values? We're seeing that in 2025 and we're seeing more jobs and more better-paying jobs.

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     My response: There is so much here "the moon is smaller than the earth but it's further away" that I feel we really don't have a forum for resolving this here. Your economic history and what happened during and just before my lifetime are quite different. The notion that government should fix the distribution problem, starting around 1910 in the United States, in the history I lived in, is what I'm trying to avoid, especially Stalin, Hitler, Castro, and Mao. Your facts are obviously quite different.

     Since you http://the-adam.com/adam/issues/words-01.html use the language so differently than I do, we're not going to get closure here, likely not in email either.

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     My response: I plan, eventually, to write up some of these differences, but I'm not in as much of a hurry as I was when I thought we were using the same language. Three points jump to mind: You can't have rights to life, liberty, or property if government is employed to take those away, FDR's New Deal (parallel to Germany's National Socialism) prolonged our Great Depression for eight years, and Reagan's presidency was enormous relief for American workers, most notably those in the lower 50%. I'll try to write this up sometime because I didn't realize there were smarter people who didn't know.

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     Bear in mind that linguists study the way language evolves. They will tell you that the search for shared meaning in an ongoing negotiation. Very necessary for successful communication. But it is simply not true that word meanings are static, and are always understood by everybody to mean the same thing.

     Using language in a manner completely contradictory to what it says isn't language evolution so much as communication subversion.

     You see the EEOC as forcing "DEI hires." I see it as allowing merit hires (mostly), with inevitable harebrained outcomes along the way. But their work has opened the doors of opportunity to many who would have been unwisely and unjustly held back otherwise, and society has benefited enormously from that improvement.

     This was not mentioned in this discussion, but I did mention it on my Meaning-of-Words piece. The record of Affirmative Action has been horrific with door of opportunity open for flagrantly-incompetent people. Elevating mediocrity is, as Ayn Rand points out, the best way to destroy excellence, in this case the excellent work of some minority-labeled people.

     You see the New Deal as damaging. I see it as shoring up departures in the real world from the functioning of Smith's "invisible hand." Without that shoring up, capitalism fails. The 50 years of the New Deal were years of growing prosperity, widely enjoyed by a large middle class. The 40 years of the Reagan Revolution were years of diminishing prosperity, a growing poverty class, a diminishing middle class, and every stronger departure from market capitalism in a feedback loop of wealth and power increasingly concentrated. Capitalism was, and is now, failing. We can counteract that. But laissez-faire policies would, as they have done for almost half a century, allow the problem to fester and threaten the end of capitalism.

     This is just so wrong in so many ways, back to something like, "the moon is smaller than the earth but it's further away." (I'll leave the subtle distinction between laissez-faire with private property and capitalism with structured ownership of enterprise for later as it doesn't affect this discussion.) The economic suffering of people from government tyranny has been manifest.

     I am utterly perplexed by the equivalence you draw between the New Deal and Nazism. How in the world do you reach that conclusion? How can we have universal rights without universal opportunity?

     Let's see, new and major redistribution of wealth, new and more-invasive government control of money, universal health care, government funding and control of education, and government dictating what companies can manufacture (example (fascism) telling Porsche what he could make) or state-owned enterprise (example (socialism) Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)). Hitler's and FDR's racial attitudes were similar, but Germany didn't have a Bill of Rights. If this analytical approach does not suffice, note that the American left, especially its vocal supporter Pete Seeger should help a reader understand the gravity of the connection between FDR and Hitler.

     I'm not sure the connection between universality of rights and opportunity, but intuition and history suggest by protecting the rights of all individuals has opened doors rather than closed them.

     How do you reach the conclusion that the poor don't work hard? Quite visibly, they work harder than any billionaire.

     Here's one example where I didn't say anything about this. I'm a conservative, I must hate the poor, I must be accusing them of not working hard, it's a knee-jerk liberal response.

     John Rawls had a thing or two to say on the subject. He was a pretty smart guy. Try your hand at refuting his assertions.

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     My response: "I see" isn't the same as "it was." The only medium I have to communicate that is words that don't mean the same to us. I'll get around to writing up another piece in http://the-adam.com/adam/issues but I doubt you're in the primary audience.

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     My response: At the risk of inadvertently communicating that I'm willing to engage with such poor commonality of language, I'll mention two that might be accessible. I never mentioned EEOC or DEI nor did I use the words poor, work, or hard except "work" in the sense of a system "working" as intended. Those two should be easy, no knowledge of history required, only grammar parsing of text.

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     Given the level of liberal so-called thought today, I apologize for anthropomorphizing the mindset in this piece to the point of responding to it. I did it out of allegience to a person I remember from nearly half a century ago.

     I'll point out the subjugation of decency to demagoguery and democracy has had a cost far higher than merely economic suffering and loss of liberty. The American left wing actively supported socialism and one in twenty people who stopped breathing between 1900 and 2020 did so at the hands of their own socialist governments.