Life, Liberty And...

"The pursuit of Happiness." Isn't that a beautiful phrase? It's arguably the most famous phrase in the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and attributed to Thomas Jefferson. On July 4, 1776, the world saw the birth of a nation where dreams would come true for all who were bold enough to pursue their own happiness.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

The words in the Declaration of Independence are carefully chosen and edited by several committees, just like the words of any other government communication. When the 9/11 attacks provided the corporate owned government with a golden opportunity to clamp down on those "liberties" that were deemed "self-evident", they named the primary piece of legislation to do so the "USA PATRIOT ACT", giving them a strong linguistic tool to call out anyone opposing this act as "unpatriotic", an enemy of the state even. Never shy of creative acronyms, these word-magicians came up with the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act; who could possibly be against that? This act has a so called "sunset clause", allowing it to expire after a certain period of time if not actively renewed. But since America is the headquarter of the new Empire On Which The Sun Never Sets, it deserves an act on which the sun never sets, and so this liberty destroying act has been renewed several times with support of both the Republicans and the Democrats; The Empire is bigger than both of them after all...

The groundwork for the continuation of the British Empire in the New World was done in 1776, and the Declaration of Independence holds much of the words on which this new empire's culture is based; you can be sure that those words have been meticulously scrutinized and edited by those who's power is derived from the mechanisms that keep intact and expand said empire. Jefferson's first draft reads: "We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness." Note that there's no mention of God, the Creator yet. Eventually it became the sentence almost everyone knows, unless you're Joe Biden of course: "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." The unalienable rights are now endowed by whichever deity you choose to worship, leaving out atheists.

But that's not even close to the whole story. Thomas Jefferson was very much inspired by the words and teachings of John Locke who envisioned the government's task to be the protection of "property", which he defined as a person's "life, liberty, and estate". You own your physical body, you own your freedom and of course you own your property. Jefferson replaced Locke's "property" with the vague notion of "the pursuit of happiness", which is generally seen as a stroke of genius on his account, but historians argue that this was yet another case of borrowed inspiration. Setting aside all the word-juggling, "life, liberty and the pursuit of property" is in fact the ideal on which the American World Empire is wholly based. And all men are not created equal according to the Founding Fathers; Jefferson himself owned a couple of hundreds of slaves who he didn't allow to pursue their own happiness, who he in fact saw as part of the property he was allowed, no, obligated to pursue.

In this crisis, as well as in all other crises and in normal daily life under the capitalist paradigm, it's clear that "property" is the defining aspect of this ideal on which the "American Dream" is based, and it takes priority above all else, including life and liberty, which can't be owned no matter what Locke said, or Jefferson for that matter. If you really buy in to the idea that you own your body, instead of just being your body and mind, you can say that people who starve to death simply couldn't afford that particular property anymore, which in turn renders obsolete the whole unalienable right to life part of the (i)deal. Boy, the cognitive dissonance we're collectively capable of just blows my mind... Anyhow, this whole rant on government linguistics, the language of empire, was inspired by this little rant by Cody, in which he discusses how capitalism's core defects come to light during the current pandemic...

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