When you hear the word “social,” it’s even money that you’re being snookered.
“Social justice,” for example, is primarily a ruse for penalizing individuals without any finding of fact as to their individual guilt. Whether you actually did anything deserving of penalty is irrelevant… it’s “social.” And if you question the deal, you’re a bad person.
The granddaddy of all the “social” scams, however, is the “social contract.” That’s what replaced the “divine right of kings” in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was falling apart. This is, in Wikipedia’s (slightly edited) words,
a theory or model that addresses the questions of the origin of society and the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual.
In other words, this was the new explanation of why it’s right for one group of men to rule over other men. Wikipedia continues:[amazon asin=1938357000&template=*lrc ad (right)]
Arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the ruler in exchange for protection of their remaining rights.
So, a group of rulers gets to ignore our rights, take away our money (continually), punish us when it wishes, and even send us off to war. And that’s all okay because we somehow agreed to the deal. It’s a “contract,” after all.
Except It’s Not
If an adult wants to sign away his rights and make himself a serf to politicians, that’s his choice, and I won’t take it from him. But for the deal to be legit, a clear agreement and authorizations on both sides are required.
A contract is (again per Wikipedia, with my emphasis):
An agreement having a lawful object entered into voluntarily by two or more parties, each of whom intends to create one or more legal obligations between them. The elements of a contract are “offer” and [amazon asin=1491068620&template=*lrc ad (right)]“acceptance” by “competent persons” having legal capacity who exchange “consideration” to create “mutuality of obligation.”
The social contract fails this standard in multiple ways. In fact, it is not a contract in any rational sense of the term. And if it’s not a contract, then the use of that word is fraudulent.
Fraud is a “false representation with the intent of persuading the victim to part with property,” and that is precisely what is being done with the social contract, and on a gigantic scale.
We have a supposed contract, and we have trillions of dollars changing hands, based upon its legitimacy. If, in fact, it is not a contract, then the entirety of the arrangement is a massive criminal fraud.
So, is this the “social contract” legitimate? Let’s examine some crucial aspects of contracts:
Competence
In order to agree to a contract, one must be competent. You cannot, for example, make a contract with a hungry five-year-old, trading a few candy bars for a third of the child’s lifetime earnings. The child is not competent and any such agreement is rightly considered invalid.[amazon asin=B00CTKW9US&template=*lrc ad (right)]
The social contract, however, is held to be binding upon us from birth. How is that possible? Can an infant do what a five-year-old or even a twelve-year-old cannot?
Verdict: The social contract fails.
Voluntary agreement
A contract must be agreed to. I was never given a choice to sign or reject such an agreement, and I doubt that you were either. There can be no contract at all without a voluntary agreement. (See the next point below for the standard objection.)
Verdict: The social contract fails.[amazon asin=1933550996&template=*lrc ad (right)]
Without duress
A contract must be agreed to “without duress.” That is, without a threat of harm.
The standard objection to my “agreement” point above is that people agree to the social contract by their actions: If you use anything provided by a government, you automatically agree to the entire social contract. That line of argument fails in several ways (entrapment for starters, followed by being informed), but the largest issue in my mind is that of duress.
To get out of the social contract, we are told, we must leave the ruler’s territory. That places the ruler’s rights above our own as a starting point, which voids any semblance of “equal justice.” But I’ll pass up that discussion for today.
Leaving the ruler’s territory means spending large amounts of money, a tremendous amount of time to make arrangements, leaving our jobs behind, leaving all our friends behind, and leaving our entire families [amazon asin=0990463109&template=*lrc ad (right)]behind.
In other words, we can only escape the social contract by undertaking difficult, expensive, and heartbreaking actions.
Imagine a Fuller Brush salesman coming to your door and offering you an assortment of brushes for thirty dollars. Then, when you politely decline, he pulls out a gun and says “No! If you don’t want the deal, you have to abandon your house. Either pay me or leave.”
Is this salesman’s demand criminal? If so, the social contract is criminal as well. Both seek to secure agreements by using duress.
Verdict: The social contract fails, both legally and on grounds of cruelty.
Undue influence
Undue influence involves “one person taking advantage of a position of power over another person.”[amazon asin=B005S28ZES&template=*lrc ad (right)]
Clearly, this applies to the social contract. First, we are compelled to attend schools run by the “other party” to the contract. These institutions teach us that the social contract is the way of the world and that any competing ideas would be crazy. And we are held in their classrooms five or more hours per day, beginning at five-years-old and running until adulthood. (If nothing else, consider the daily “Pledge of Allegiance” and try to count the number of times you were made to recite it.)
On top of that, the “other party” employs legions of armed men and authorizes them to violently subdue those who oppose them and their rules.
If these things are not undue influence, then nothing is. You can’t indoctrinate the other party, hold a sword to his throat, force him to sign, and still call it a contract.
Verdict: The social contract fails.
Mutuality of obligation
With no “mutuality of obligation,” there can be no contract. If the other side of the contract is not meeting their obligations, there must be recourse.
After the US government failed to protect New Yorkers on 9/11, all eight million of them should have been entitled to a refund. Clearly the other side of the deal failed to meet their obligations. (That, of course, didn’t happen: the loss of their rights only got worse.)
And then we have the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which removes all the most serious consequences from the other side of the deal.
There is no mutuality of obligation in the social contract. Therefore, it’s not a contract.
Verdict: The social contract fails.
I could go on, but I think my point is made. I have cited five clear violations of contract law and alluded to several others. If even one of these is valid, the “social contract” is invalid.
If the terms of a contract are uncertain or incomplete, it’s no contract at all. And for one party to continue to seize the goods of the other, claiming a contractual right to do so, is criminal fraud.
The Real Purpose of the “Contract”
As with the divine right of kings that preceded it, the hidden and essential aspect of the social contract is to give subjects a reason to submit.
The obvious reason for the subject to submit is that rulers employ thousands of armed men, who are authorized and prepared to punish disobedience. This, however, isn’t really enough for effective rulership. Policemen and jails are expensive, and many, many more than our current number would be required, if fear was the sole reason for obedience.
For governance to work, the subjects must believe that obeying is the right thing to do, and that’s where the social contract comes in: It gives people a reason to obey, beyond a mere threat. It saves them from having to face fear or even to consciously submit.
Strange as it may sound, an effective ruler must equip his or her subjects to obey. It’s a fundamental factor in rulership. And that’s the true purpose of the “social contract.”
So…
By any legal standard, the “social contract” fails. That won’t cause any rulers to change, of course, but truth still matters to some of us.
Reprinted with permission from Casey research.
