“This is the story of a duel. It is a duel between two very unequal adversaries: an exceedingly powerful, formidable, and ruthless state and an insignificant, unknown private individual. The duel does not take place in what is commonly known as the sphere of politics; the individual is by no means a politician, still less a conspirator or an enemy of the state. Throughout, he finds himself very much on the defensive. He only wishes to preserve what he considers his integrity, his private life, and his personal honor. These are under constant attack by the government of the country he lives in, and by the most brutal, but often also clumsy, means.”
—Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler (paperback, Kindle, audiobook)
I am writing to express grave concerns regarding the Human Rights Act Reform: A Modern Bill of Rights – Consultation, which recommends extensive revisions to the Human Rights Act 1998.
I often contemplate how people who consider themselves virtuous can blithely commit acts, make decisions, and enact policies that infringe the rights; curtail the liberties; and inflict anguish and even death on incalculable individuals.
I’m not talking about the tyrants—who are nearly all psychopaths—but about the ordinary colluders, without whose cooperation the tyrants could not execute their tyranny.
Is it bribery? Blackmail? Threats? Hypnosis? Ideological capture? Social and political pressures? Lust for power? Envy? Fear? Pride? Likely miscellaneous mashups of the above depending on the participant—served with a philanthropic side of self-delusion.
Since you’ve made the effort to read this far, I’ll be charitable and assume it’s just self-delusion in your case. You probably believe these policy reforms are for the best. Unless you’re a blackguard, that’s the only way you could cope with the moral ramifications of green-lighting legal transubstantiations that unfurl the crimson carpet for totalitarianism.
So, before you read further, I have a simple request. Try to actively resist the temptation to rationalize, to justify, to abstract away the concrete consequences of your decisions. Resolve to cease lying to yourself, as Dostoyevsky’s Father Zossima admonishes:
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”
Take a deep, belly-filling breath. Stand up and wiggle your whole body, from your toes to your knees to your elbows to your nose. Feel the physicality of your body and notice your sensations. Don’t be afraid to feel silly. Laugh at yourself. Shake out all the lies. Blow raspberries if you like.
Then let all the truths you’ve been hiding from your conscience rise to your consciousness. At this point, you may need a cathartic cry. That’s okay. It means you’re human and thus better-equipped to make decisions about human rights policies than a sociopathic bureaucrat.
Doesn’t that feel better? Don’t you feel lighter, more open, more welcoming of ideas that stretch your thinking?
With that frame of mind, let’s examine some of those proposed reforms, starting with:
“[O]ur system must strike the proper balance of rights and responsibilities, individual liberty and the public interest, rigorous judicial interpretation, and respect for the authority of elected law-makers.”
These sound like the gilded words all authoritarian regimes deploy to persuade people to accept degradations of their individual liberties and rights in the name of the notorious “greater good.”
Reading that statement as beneficent requires a cultivated amnesia about the totalitarianism that bloodied the bleakest decades of the last century.
In his May 1983 essay Totalitarianism & the Lie, Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski writes:
“In both forms of totalitarian socialism—nationalist and internationalist—social control of production for the common good was stressed as essential.”
He continues:
“The destructive action of totalitarian machinery is usually supported by a special kind of primitive social philosophy. It proclaims not only that the common good of ‘society’ has priority over the interest of individuals, but that the very existence of individuals, as persons, is reducible to the existence of the social ‘whole’; in other words, personal existence is, in a strange sense, unreal. This is a convenient foundation for any ideology of slavery.”
See if you recognize that foundation for the ideology of slavery in these items from the Executive Summary (emphasis mine):
- [#3] “We will overhaul the Human Rights Act passed by the then Labour government in 1998 and restore common sense to the application of human rights in the UK.… we will reverse the mission creep that has meant human rights law being used for more and more purposes, and often with little regard for the rights of wider society.”
- [#4] “Our reforms will be a check on the expansion and inflation of rights without democratic oversight and consent, and will provide greater legal certainty.”
- [#6] “The Bill of Rights will make sure a proper balance is struck between individuals’ rights, personal responsibility, and the wider public interest.”
- [#9] “provide greater clarity regarding the interpretation of certain rights, such as the right to respect for private and family life, by guiding the UK courts in interpreting the rights and balancing them with the interests of our society as a whole”
- [#9] “recognise that responsibilities exist alongside rights, and that these should be reflected in the approach to balancing qualified rights and the remedies available for human rights claims”
These statements unapologetically articulate the authors’ intention to roll back individual human rights for the sake of “wider society,” a sentiment repeatedly echoed throughout the document.1
