The liberal humanist believes in humanity and believes that we are all part of humanity. This is true, we are all humans, part of the human race and nothing we can do or say can remove us from the human race. We can be good humans, bad humans or even shining lights that show humanity a new path. But there are a few paradoxes and some false logic that needs to be explored.
People like Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein or Nikola Tesla were great inventors, shining stars among the rest of humanity. Their labors and their inventions propelled humanity into a new and advanced society. I don’t think there is any debate about that. If there was any question to be raised it might be about how these inventors lived in society and adapted to it. These people were brilliant and lived in a world that the rest of society didn’t even know existed! They thought of things and invented things that no one else even believed was possible.
Yet even though they lived in a different world than the rest of humanity, they were still human and still belonged to human society. They were true individuals and yet a part of society as well. The true individual is always a part of society. Society is always created out of individuals. But it is never in society’s best interest to recognize individuals or the rights of individuals. That is because society is only interested in the bonds that we collectively share. It is not interested at all in the things that make us different from each other.
But the things that unite us, that we share in common with others is not really who we define ourselves as being! We define ourselves and think of ourselves as unique individuals living unique lives and experiencing things from unique perspectives. The only way that we can grow together and experience each other in a meaningful way is by exploring our differences! It is the exploration of our differences and discovering ways in which we are similar that society grows. It’s only by recognizing who we are as individuals that we can discover who others are as individuals!
No matter how hard society tries to get rid of the individual and the rights of individuals it runs into this paradox, that it is created out of individuals! To negate the individual and the rights of individuals would be to deny the existence of itself and what it truly consists of. The best society can do is completely ignore the individual and the question of individual rights. It does that by focusing only upon those things we all have in common as humans.
So it leaves the individual to itself and the rights of individuals are tolerated because it can’t do anything about them unless it comes into an uncompromising collision with them.
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