What's Wrong with Human Rights

Summary

It Could Happen Here – "What's Wrong with Human Rights"

Date: July 7, 2026
Hosts: Mick and James Stout
Podcast: It Could Happen Here (Cool Zone Media / iHeartPodcasts)

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Episode Overview

This episode, provocatively titled "What's Wrong with Human Rights," takes a critical yet thoughtful look at the concept of human rights. Far from dismissing their value, hosts Mick and James Stout delve into the historical roots, philosophical foundations, and practical shortcomings of human rights, particularly as they are implemented (or ignored) on a global scale. The discussion brings in historical context, philosophical debates, real-world examples, and memorable metaphors, all while questioning the efficacy and limitations of the human rights framework.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The Intention Behind Critiquing Human Rights

Not an Anti–Human Rights Episode

• Mick clarifies from the outset that the intention is not to denounce human rights but to deeply examine their flaws and provoke critical thought.
  • Quote [01:41]: “I am not against human rights or the ideals they embody and aspire to. Human rights are, in fact, a flawed attempt at making the world a better place for all human beings. And it is exactly those flaws that I want to address here.” – Mick

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2. History and Evolution of Human Rights

From Natural Rights to Universal Declarations

• Origins: Traces ideas of rights back to Zoroastrianism, Greek and Roman philosophy (e.g., Cicero, Seneca), and highlights the concept of rights based on nature rather than religion. [04:40–06:00]
• Social Contract: Explains the evolution to social contract theory (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) and critiques its often imaginary premise of "active consent."
  • Quote [07:08]: “I didn’t agree to anything. I must have missed that meeting.” – Mick, humorously critiquing the notion of implied consent in social contracts
• Declaration of Human Rights: Details the 1948 UN Universal Declaration, its achievements, and its limitations.
  • “To this day, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is still one of the most significant milestones of the 20th century… but it isn’t perfect.” – Mick [12:10–13:50]

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3. Flaws and Misuse of Human Rights in Practice

Selective Application and Political Weaponization

• Discusses how states often use human rights rhetoric as justification for interventions serving their own interests (e.g., Iraq, Georgia, Ukraine, Kosovo, Bangladesh).
  • Quote [15:28]: “It’s always telling where states decide that it’s important to go to war for human rights, and where they don’t.” – James
  • “No one’s rolling out to defend the human rights of Rohingya people in Myanmar, for example.” – Mick [15:44]
• The episode underscores the selective and instrumental enforcement of rights, with some populations left abandoned by the international community despite explicit appeals.
  • Example: Myanmar’s appeals to "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) and the West’s inaction [16:00–17:57]

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4. Rights vs. Obligations: Simone Weil’s Critique

Reframing the Discourse

• Introduces philosopher Simone Weil, who advocated prioritizing obligations over rights, arguing obligations are more fundamental and durable.
  • “Rights are only meaningful to the extent that others respect those rights. Obligations exist outside those conditions.” – Mick [21:33]
• Uses compelling examples and metaphors (including a reference to the "Philosophize This" podcast and a chicken market analogy) to illustrate how legality/legal rights often fail as moral justifications.
  • Extended metaphor [23:29]: If someone is forced into prostitution, the gut instinct that it’s immoral is more rooted in a violated obligation to dignity than a broken law.
• The distinction between legality, morality, and the sense of justice is a recurring theme.
  • Quote [24:14]: “It’s your human response and your sense of decency, not Law 23, subsection, etc.” – Mick

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5. The Philosophical Problem: Rights Without Enforcement

Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and the "Right to Have Rights"

• Community and Recognition: Discusses Arendt’s concepts of zoe (mere existence) and bios (a meaningful, political life), emphasizing that rights require a political community to enforce them.
  • “The most fundamental right is the right to have rights—the right to belong to a political community.” – Mick [30:22]
• Statelessness and the Limitations of Rights: Stateless people (like refugees/migrants, or isolated groups like the Sentinelese) serve as examples of how rights are often unenforceable or even meaningless without a community or state apparatus willing to recognize and defend them.
  • James’ story about feeding people in U.S. immigration detention: “It was us fulfilling our obligations to each other, not their theoretical rights under the state, which mattered.” [34:02]
• Explores the moral imperative to help others even in the absence (or failure) of formal rights mechanisms.

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6. Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On the Social Contract:
  • “Hobbes was an idiot.” – Mick [08:44]
  • “Jim Scott deals with this a little bit, right… those who exist without the state aren’t behind those within it, just on a different pathway.” – James [09:01]
• Disillusionment with Rights Enforcement:
  • “Rights only matter insofar as someone is prepared to use force to protect them… and nobody was, apart from the people of Myanmar themselves.” – James [16:41]
• Simone Weil’s Life and Philosophy:
  • “As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it, it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.” – (Freese, via Mick) [21:26]
• On Community Obligations:
  • “When humanity is devalued, my humanity is devalued.” – James [34:59]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro/Disclaimer about Human Rights – [01:41–03:15]
• History & Philosophy of Rights – [03:33–10:54]
• Social Contract Critique – [06:00–09:53]
• UN Declaration & Global Context – [10:54–14:31]
• Selective Application & Political Misuse – [14:31–18:21]
• Simone Weil & Obligations over Rights – [19:26–26:32]
• Legality vs. Morality Example (Handmaid’s Tale, IS, etc.) – [24:39–26:32]
• Subject vs. Object; Hannah Arendt & Agamben – [27:35–32:49]
• Community & The Right to Have Rights – [32:49–34:16]
• Statelessness & Concrete Examples – [34:16–36:15]
• Sentinelese Example & Episode Wrap-Up – [36:15–37:14]

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Notable Quotes

• “Rights only matter insofar as someone is prepared to use force to protect them in this instance. And nobody was, apart from the people of Myanmar themselves.” – James [16:41]
• “Rights are only meaningful to the extent that others respect those rights. To [Weil], obligations exist outside those conditions.” – Mick [21:33]
• “Do you know what will destroy your soul and being? … The products and services that support this podcast.” – [27:19] (Comic moment)
• “When humanity is devalued, my humanity is devalued… Humanity is guaranteed by other humans, not by states.” – James [34:59]

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Episode Tone & Style

The discussion is intellectually rigorous but approachable, peppered with humor, pop culture references, and self-deprecating asides. Both hosts balance depth and accessibility, often pausing to clarify abstract philosophical points in relatable language.

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Summary for New Listeners

This episode challenges the assumption that “human rights” are universally respected or meaningful by tracing their philosophical history, critiquing their selective application, and questioning their practical reality—especially for marginalized and stateless peoples. Through historical context, philosophical critique (Simone Weil, Arendt, Agamben), and vivid real-world examples, the hosts argue that authentic moral obligations (between humans) precede and persist beyond legal rights. Ultimately, the episode urges listeners to consider not just the existence of rights, but their enforceability and the deeper, communal obligations we owe each other.

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For listeners seeking a nuanced, critical, and occasionally irreverent exploration of the foundations and pitfalls of human rights, this episode is both engaging and thought-provoking.

Transcript

[James Stout]

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[Mick]

Before we start, I want to make something inescapably clear. I am not against human rights or the ideals they embody and aspire to. Human rights are in fact, a flawed attempt at making the world a better place for all human beings. And it is exactly those flaws that I want to address here. Just having universal human rights does not mean any progress or any improvements in that regard are no longer necessary. To reach those there needs to be in depth conversations and critiques. I've deliberately chosen a provocative title to start this episode if said title makes it through post production. Because I think the best way to have this conversation is if we temporarily strip any blind assumptions. There should not, for the time being, be a standard answer to just default back to so let me say it again. The concepts and ideals of universal human rights are good and well intended. This is not a plea against either of those. This is just to ensure that we can all engage with the flaws and the criticisms that are currently laid at the feet of those human rights. Please don't hate me. Further, there will be some abstract concepts and theories here. I'll do my best to explain them in layman's terms. Unfortunately, the ivory tower of the university is still a thing and I think this bit should be accessible to everyone, not just university educated people. So if I'm being a bit reductive or un nuanced, it is to make it widely available. And with that, hello everyone. Welcome to It Could Happen. Here I am, Mick. I'm joined by the lovely James Stout. Hi James, how are you doing?

[James Stout]

Hey, good. I'm good. I'm excited about this.

[Mick]

Yeah, we're going to go through a lot today. When I pitched this, I thought it would be just a fun 30 minute episode and now we're at like 5,000 words and 10 pages of script. So.

[James Stout]

Yeah, these things can get away from you.

[Mick]

Yes, exactly. And there's always the context. It's always context. You can just throw things out there. But I had to kill some darlings, unfortunately. But there we go. So to start off, we first have to explore a little bit about the history of human rights and how they came to be. When we are talking about rights, we are speaking of either a legal, a social or an ethical rule that is connected to legal systems, social conventions or neurorefical standpoints that are seen as normal for a certain group at a certain time because they evolve, they change. These rights are often inscribed, codified or written down in either legal documents or in the public consciousness. And what I mean by the latter is like forming a queue for the bus or the train. It's not something that's often written down in illegal code or something. It's just an unwritten rule that exists between the people.

[James Stout]

Yeah, convention most likely.

[Mick]

If you're going to skip queues, you'll never be prosecuted or fined for that. People will probably think you're a bit of an asshole.

[James Stout]

So yeah.

[Mick]

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in 1948 by the UN. Prior to this, the concept of human rights was largely found in the idea of natural rights. The very first historical notion of this that we know of was in the Zoroastrian religion in the Iran region, which thought that citizens have a fundamental right to enlightened leadership and that people had the right to rise up against those who are wicked. Similar ideas surrounding rights are also found in ancient Greek philosophy, like the Epicurean school of thought and the Stoics. Later it was also explicitly named by Roman philosophers, which they probably stole from the Greeks like Cicero and Seneca. Did that Cicero once said that we are born for justice, and that right is based not upon opinions, but upon nature. And I think this is important to zoom in on a bit. Romans were very. Not very religious, but it was a religious society. They had tons of deities. But despite that, it's to nature that Cicero makes that claims.

[James Stout]

Yeah, as opposed to God or gods.

[Mick]

Right, Exactly. There is something innate or something by virtue of being human that gives you those rights. There was in the 17th century was the English philosopher John Locke, who discussed similar things, particularly that fundamental rights, as he called them, such as life, liberty and estate, estate meaning property in this case, are things that could not be handed over or transferred under the social contract. With social contract, it is often meant that you as an individual have surrendered some of your rights and handed them over to the authority under which you fall or to which you are subject. Often this exchange translates to that the authority to which you hand it over will then protect your remaining rights. Yeah, usually this is framed as consensual, as a voluntary deal you make or have made with, again, whichever authority happens to hold control over you. I also think it's worth noting that consent implies an active decision with knowledge and circumstances and the ability to consent. And this is just my own personal gripe whenever people refer back to the social contract. I didn't agree to anything. I must have missed that meeting.

[James Stout]

But yeah, it relies on this thought experiment, this idea of, would someone in X circumstance do y thing? This is what Hobbes does, right?

[Mick]

Yes.

[James Stout]

Like, I guess Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau would be the people you'd want to read if you wanted to learn more about this. In Rojava, they have an explicit social contract. Right. Which is like a document and people do get to consent on it. I guess I should say consult rather than consent. Right. There was a long consultative process that was part of the formation of the most recent social contract in Rojava, as opposed to like, requiring, like, universal consensus to be. To be established.

[Mick]

Once again, Rojavaz leading the way.

[James Stout]

Yeah, showing us all the way, but that's relatively unusual.

[Mick]

Yeah, we will be touching a little bit on Hobbes and Rousseau.

[James Stout]

Okay, fun.

[Mick]

But to sum the latter bit up, like, the virtue of being born hardly checks my boxes for active consent, but I think there's some bureaucrats out there who will disagree with me on that. As you said, James, the idea of the social contract came from philosophers like Rousseau and Hobbes and are core to our contemporary understanding of social and political theory and are also foundational to Most liberal democracies, the ideas as following. First, there was no state and no authority, and everyone was in a state of nature where human existence was harsh and brute and short.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Nasty, brutish. And short is the. Like his exact words, the Hobbes quote that gets deployed a lot about people and things.

[Mick]

Yes. Ignoring the fact that Hobbes was an idiot.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And that life without the state is not nasty, brutish and short. And we have a lot of examples of this.

[Mick]

No, but it's this retroactive justification because this is how things are now. So I am inventing a story to justify how we end up here.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Jim Scott, I guess, kind of deals with this a little bit. Right. In the art of not being governed, when he's talking about the idea that those who exist without the state are behind those who exist within the state, as opposed to just on a different pathway they've chosen to follow.

[Mick]

Yeah. Because, like, we need the authority and you need the social contract, because otherwise humanity is just subject to its own worst impulses, like our Hunger Games without the dystopian stuff inside it. Therefore, we need authority, which was created to keep this state of nature at bay and make or keep us civilized. And this also then ties in with, like, the monopoly on violence, because that is one of the rights that you surrender under the social contract and is given to, like, specialized government forces in order to use the violence that is necessary to maintain order.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mick]

As a small side note, the whole state of nature thing is pretty much bullshit. On why that is is discussed at length in the dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengro. But it would be way too much to also include here. You'd have to listen to me all week.

[James Stout]

I do have an audiobook of the dawn of Everything and it is. It's a lot of audiobook.

[Mick]

Yeah. It's such a massive book. Just massive.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mick]

Just as a small clarification before we move on, there are many more notable figures who've written about, like, natural rights, Francis Hutcheon, Hegel and Thomas Paine. Clearly there are also many more who did that in the American context, like Thomas Jefferson. But everyone listening to this knows the American stuff way better than I do, so I'll just skip that. Including the parts where Jefferson was pretty selective on who counted as a human being and who didn't.

[James Stout]

Many such cases.

[Mick]

Yeah, many such cases. Unfortunately, it has not gone away as much as it should have.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mick]

So the biggest criticism that we have here to address against natural rights is that you can't draw from facts. It's something that you say is out there, but you can prove it through science or through empirical research, through data collection. It's something that comes from tradition, authority, or morality. There is no argument to be made that it exists in the same way as the coffee on my desk as I'm writing this. To put it very bluntly, natural rights being inherent or unalienable is just saying they exist because I say so. It has just as much weight as me claiming that I now own James's chickens, which I now do. It is a fact.

[James Stout]

You have to fight me for them. I'm not surrendering the monopoly on chickens.

[Mick]

Yes, you know where I live. You can fat ax them to me. So what has happened is by putting these natural rights into law, we can make them like real or tangible in the sense that there is something you can point to, like that thing says it or this law says it. It transforms natural rights from something that is scientifically baseless into like a part of the social contract and thus should be upheld by whatever authority, state or government you happen to be subject to. The creation of constitutions in democracies is like a very explicit attempt to make rights real. But as we all know, there are also not infallible. In the wake of the horrors of the Second World War, the international community drafted and voted on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was a massive step at the time. Of the 58 member states at the time, 48 voted in favor, two did not participate, and eight abstained from voting. For those of you who are paying attention, there are so little countries that voted on it because judges were less countries back then. And an exact number is very hard to find because all data sets and all definitions just differ. To this day, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is still one of the most significant milestones of the 20th century. It has pretty neutral language in terms of culture, religion, or any particular political system. It also became a stepping stone for the International Bill of Human Rights and several different treaties, with all 193 UN member states as of now, as signing at least one or more of those treaties. Yeah, I can't understate how massive that achievement is. And before we were actually criticizing it. I do think it's right to recognize it, but it isn't perfect, which is why we're also going to kick against its shinbone for a while. So to the surprise of no one, human rights are flawed but good. They've also been used pretty disingenuously. And that is where I like to start, they have often been used as, like, a justification for war to obscure or hide other motivations. Like think of the Iraq war. No, not. Not that one. The Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Yeah. The Saddam government publicly stated that they wanted to support a revolutionary government in Kuwait, that it was for Arab solidarity. They also cited that the current administration over there was incredibly unpopular and thus they had to invade for greater political and economic freedom for the Kuwaiti people. What was widely seen as, like, the actual motivations were oil resources and more regional control. Because, of course.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mick]

Russia has also used human rights as a reason for invading.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mick]

You look very surprised at that. Shapes.

[James Stout]

I was about to say the same thing. Like, Russia loves to do this.

[Mick]

Yes. They did it in 2008 with, like, when they invaded Georgia because they had to protect Russian citizens and peacekeepers, while it was mainly about preventing NATO expansion in the newly independent Georgia. Same thing happened in 2014 when they first invaded Ukraine because Russian speakers had to be protected from Ukrainian fascists. There was also the Serbian forces in Bosnia and Kosovo, where the Serbs were under threat, and India's campaign into East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh. Although in that latter one, the motivations seem a bit more muddled because it appears there's some genuine concern there for human rights or humanitarian aid. But again, muddled limited time.

[James Stout]

And I think it's always telling where states decide that it's important to go to war for human rights and where they don't. Right.

[Mick]

Yeah. We're very selective when these rights need to be enforced or when there's violence needed for it to be enforced.

[James Stout]

Yeah. No one's rolling out to defend the human rights of Rohingya people in Myanmar, for example.

[Mick]

No, exactly. And like, I think you said this at some point, but, like, when in Myanmar the revolution started, there was like, an explicit appeal to, like, human rights.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And like a very well elucidated appeal to, like, R2P, the right to protect. I think I'd have to check responsibility to protect. It's what R2P stands for. Not right, but responsibility. So it's a responsibility of a state to intervene in the internal affairs of another state if human rights are being abused in that state. It's the best of my understanding of it anyway. And this is as it's been explained to me by many, many young people in Myanmar. I actually spoke to a young person in Myanmar who had orchestrated, at great risk of their life, a massive R2P, like, floating sort of symbol that could be seen from the air, I guess. Explicitly to alert the world that our human rights are being violated and we have human rights. So surely the people who guarantee those rights will intervene to protect those rights. So like you saw signs explicitly calling on asean, on the un, on the European Union, on the United States, and like also people trying to make signs that were very funny so that they would go viral in English because they wanted the world to see them. And they figured if the world saw them they'd be like, huh, human rights are being violated. And it took a lot of dead people for I think because that's a very entrenched view that many of us have right, that we have these rights. We do. But rights only matter insofar as they are someone is prepared to use force to protect them in this instance. And nobody was apart from the people of Myanmar themselves, right? So rights based discourse is still very, very common there. Now those rights are backed up by people who initially used homemade and 3D printed firearms and now have much better firearms. But the reason those people have those rights is because they fought for them, not because the rights enforced themselves or any other state decided to enforce them.

[Mick]

No, exactly. It is pretty revealing that when a people desperately in need for their rights to be upheld by some force or by some army or whatever, and they're making explicit appeals to it and the international community as a whole is like,

[James Stout]

nah, yeah, they close their rights in their ears.

[Mick]

But they were unalienable.

[James Stout]

So yeah, great.

[Mick]

They still technically had them sort of maybe, right? Yeah, they should have bought a premium package. And Also yes, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, I did not forget it was very much justified as a mission of liberation and freeing people from a dictator. While it was much again oil and influence as it always is. Which is why you will now have to listen to ads so cool Zone media can get some much needed oil and influence.

[James Stout]

Nice.

[Mick]

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[James Stout]

EDU.

[Mick]

That's a degree better. And we're back now loaded with petrodollars. It is time to dive deeper into the critiques. So someone whose work was incredibly influential in the realm of philosophy and ethics was Simone Vail. James, I think you may have heard of her. Yeah.

[James Stout]

She was with the Darutti Column, an international group. She burned herself frying eggs in a farmhouse that they liberated and had to go home.

[Mick]

Yeah. She is a fascinating figure.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Someone who just like Forest Gumps through the history of amazing things in that time period.

[Mick]

Yes, it was like, I have written this down in the script, but when she was 8 or 9, she refused to eat chocolate or something. It's solidarity with the soldiers overseas or the soldiers who were fighting in World War I. There's tons of incredible stuff in there.

[James Stout]

Oh, amazing.

[Mick]

I didn't know that she taught at a university. But then in 1934, she took a leave of absence from teaching to work anonymously in two different labor factories because she better wanted to understand the working class. A few years later, she would join the Anarchist Doruti column, as you said, and fight in the Spanish Civil War, where she very badly wanted to fight, despite her outspoken pacifism. But her comrades held her back because she was incredibly nearsighted. They were like, yeah, we don't trust you with this machine gun. Which.

[James Stout]

Fair. Yeah.

[Mick]

And she died eventually at a very young age in 1943, due to her poor health, that is, while she was sick. She would only eat whatever she thought residents of Nazi occupied France would be able to eat and refused to eat more, as her biographer Richard Frees summed up. As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it, it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.

[James Stout]

Wow.

[Mick]

That's badass in my book.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. It's a cool way of phrasing, too. It's a beautiful sentence. Yeah.

[Mick]

Simone was very critical of the concept of rights, and she much preferred to speak of obligations. The latter, she argued, are much more fundamental than rights, because rights are only meaningful to the extent that others respect those rights. To her, rights are relative and related to certain conditions, but obligations exist outside those conditions. On the surface, this may seem like the same criticism we had earlier, that they only exist out there and only because I say so. But I think she moves further than that because she sees a system that has its foundation on these obligations, specifically what she calls the need for a soul. To her, these needs are the things that we as human beings require to thrive. Food, shelter, medicine, but also equality, freedom of opinion and security in the form of not having any persistent fears. There are many more in her book. I'm not going to delve much deeper in it because I think the Gist is out there. This may seem like a very theoretical difference, but let me illustrate what I think is a very strong example of like, rights versus obligations. I have stolen this metaphor from the Philosophize, this podcast, okay. From the episode in which the host discusses the modern day concentration camp and Giorgio Agamben. So all the credit to that host for this metaphor. So let's get back to those chickens that used to belong to James, but that I now own. Like, it is my right in a legal and economic sense to sell these at the markets. And it is my right to sell them for any price that I think they are worth. Just as it is my right to very quickly go out of business because nobody wants to buy my $5,000 chickens. And now I'm going to be a bit provocative. Just feel free to respond.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mick]

What if someone were to be forced into prostitution either by coercion or violence?

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Mick]

Why is that wrong? Why is that disgusting and abhorrent?

[James Stout]

Yeah, for many reasons.

[Mick]

Is the reason for that because this person has a legal right to not be forced into prostitution, or is there something else going on there?

[James Stout]

Well, there's a lot. There's a lot more going on there. Right. Like it's a part. Because it's like disgusting to us as people that someone's forced to do this without their consent and without consenting like actively to doing a thing that they are being forced to do against their will.

[Mick]

Yeah, exactly. But it speaks to the nature of rights that like, your first instinct is not to say, oh, but that's against the law. Your first instinct is to say like, oh, geez, that's fucked up.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's wrong.

[Mick]

And it is wrong because what you're doing is like violating the agency, the autonomy, the dignity, the sense of belonging to themselves and their bodies. It is something that, it is much more a gut feeling, something that exists out there, rather than like pointing to Law 23, subsection, to paragraph three, whatever.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Mick]

And we can put it in a more concrete example like the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. In short, for those who are not familiar with either the book or the show, it's about a patriarchal, totalitarian republic, very religious, where some women are forcibly assigned to powerful and high status men to bear children for them. Now, in this society, the sexual violence, the forced pregnancies, the births, they're entirely legal. Like the people doing it. And that's not just the men in those books. They are doing it within their rights. It is legal what they're doing. But Also going to ask you as like the listener, does that make it any less fucked up?

[James Stout]

Yeah, like, I guess we can argue the same thing. In the Islamic State, right? There were people who were forced into slavery, sexually assaulted, sexual violence was commonplace. It was at least accepted. I'm not familiar with the exact legal structures of the Islamic State with regard to that, but certainly it was widespread and not condemned. And like, that doesn't matter. It was still wrong. It was still disgusting. Right. Which is why people, including people in Kurdistan, decided to take up arms against it.

[Mick]

And very rightfully so.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I guess they're like universal human rights were violated that their rights under the Islamic State and so much as that was a state, which it was, Were not.

[Mick]

Yeah, and we'll get there. Because there's like a difference between having universal rights and having a sovereign that is going to respect them. So, yeah, sorry for that painful metaphor. I think that both of these make it clear, although maybe painfully clear, like, legality has nothing to do with it. Like the rights have nothing to do with it. It's your human response and your lack, or the fact that you have a sense of decency that makes something like wrong or right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mick]

So the right to not be preyed upon can be taken away as they're all right, but the sense of injustice, of wrongness, will not. There exists an obligation to the people in your community, regardless of which community or the size of it, to not do horrific shit like that and in the process destroy part of someone's soul and being. The lack of any empirical data does not mean that there isn't something there, even if it's just like a gut feeling or a sense of justice. Weil and myself would say it's wrong because we have an obligation to others to respect them. That by like just being born human, you have to have your agency and your autonomy and your dignity respected. But do you know what will destroy your soul and being?

[James Stout]

Is it the products and services that support this podcast?

[Mick]

It definitely is.

[James Stout]

They already have.

[Mick]

And we're back after the identity crushing stream of serdocs and produces or whatever. To quickly recap what we said before the break, which is that you can say that there is something beyond rights, as rights can conveniently be taken away when those in power think that is what they need to do. It is what Simone Vale would call the difference between being a subject and being an object. Being a subject is something in the sense that you can be subject to a queen. Through that lens, being a subject means that you're only Seen as something that is value right in relation to the queen. There is a relational aspect here that defines what over who you are. Being seen as an object here means that you exist in and of yourself and that you're not defined because of the definition of something else. I think a good way to view this is to think of someone's child, son or daughter, and thinking of that same person as just themselves. Like in the first one, it's the relation that you emphasize. In the latter, you just see them as a person, regardless of linear image or relation. I fear this next part could be rather complex, but I'll do my best to go into layman's terms. It evolves some pretty complex philosophy about authors whom many people have read but few understand. Yeah, myself included. I'm an idiot. I'm just trying to make it make sense and make it like, clear and legible for everyone who hasn't read these authors. And I probably wouldn't recommend reading them. So we're speaking of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. Both made some major critiques of human rights. And these are in relation to each other to an extent. So to start off, they make distinctions and definitions on what it is to be human and what it is to be recognized as a human being. Arendt uses the terms zoe and bios for this, like the Greek terms.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Mick]

Zoe is the idea and the concept of life in a purely biological sense, as just a biological unit that breathes, that consumes, that defecates.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Mick]

Think of someone living alone in the mountains without anyone else nearby or any contact with other human beings. Like biologically, yes, they are human. There's no denying that. But in terms of bios meaning a life that has meaning and that is political, it becomes less obvious that that person alone in the mountains can be recognized as human.

[James Stout]

Sure, yeah. Part of being human is being part of a community. Right. We only are able to fully realize ourselves in the context of other people.

[Mick]

Exactly. And that is what I'm getting at without saying that this person that abounds is not a human being, but they're isolated and not part of a community. Think of making meaningful moments together with those dear to you. That is, in a sense, the meaning that the term bios kind of points to. Living alone in the woods also means there's no community or no sovereign power to hold someone accountable or to uphold their supposedly unalienable rights. As a little pointer between I'm going to use state power, sovereign, or government pretty much interchangeably, because I don't want to repeat the same words or say power every two sentences. I think that would make for a boring listening. But just so you as the listener know that that is somewhat intentional. So it is in the context of the man in the mountains that we should interpret Zoe and Bios not like, as in literal black and white checkboxes, but like, as a nuanced lens to look through. And if we look through this lens, then the following pops up. For someone to have bios, there needs to be a community. There needs to be a sovereign, or as Hannah Arendt would say, a political community that can be any group of people, any country, political identity or ideology that doesn't really matter for you to belong to a political community, whichever one of those categories it is. But that is the most fundamental rights, according to Hannah Arendt. And we'll get into why she also calls it, like, the right to have rights, the right to belong to a political community that in turn cherishes you and upholds those rights for you. The man in the woods has no one to do that for him. He lacks a certain political and legal recognition of his humanity that comes with being part of community. If we think of people on the move, of migrants or of stateless people, then we can look at them as not having a political community. And in the context of Bios, as Aaron puts it, there is also no political community to emphasize their humanity or uphold their human rights. Yeah, because there is no system or sovereign that can uphold them or enforce those ideas.

[James Stout]

Sometimes they're able to act collectively to protect each other. Right. Like within that. But that is a different thing. Right, That's.

[Mick]

Yeah, that.

[James Stout]

I guess you could call that obligation. Right. That is their obligation to each other, that they are fulfilling when they do that. Right. Like that. As you say, that. No, no powerful entity is obliged to protect their rights. You could look at the example of outdoor detention in the U.S. right? I remember once I was out feeding people in outdoor detention with Prop. Actually, he also has a podcast on this network. And we ran into this guy had like a. He had like a polo on. And I said, the fuck are you doing? Who the fuck is this? He had like, nice shoes. And I was like, what's happening out here? This guy was from the office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. Because you have a bunch of rights in the U.S. right? That person came along and they had a clipboard and they did a bunch of stuff and it didn't matter. Right. There's people. A bunch of those people's rights were being violated I'm sure the person ticked a bunch of boxes on their, like, which rights are being violated for them. It didn't feed those people. We did. Didn't keep them warm that night. We did. Didn't build them a shelter. We did. Right. Like it was us fulfilling our obligations to each other, not their theoretical rights under the state, which mattered.

[Mick]

Exactly. And just to point out like that, prior to that, not necessarily part of your political community, but you just feel that it is your obligation as a human being to like, I can help these people, I can feed them, I can keep them warm.

[James Stout]

Yeah, exactly. Like. And is it Locke who does ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. Maybe not Hemingway, Hemingway wrote the book. But it's based on. No, it's. Ah, man, we gotta Google this. Because otherwise that's not For Whom the bell Tolls. John Dunn. So other John. I think about that a lot. It's something I would hear, like, occasionally referenced in reference to the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War, including by John McCain who wrote an obituary for the last American international brigadier to die. Which is like one of the less shitty things John McCain did, which he did to many shitty things, terrible things. But like, inherent in that is the idea that, like the bell here being the funerary bell.

[Mick]

Right.

[James Stout]

That like, I guess when humanity is devalued, my humanity is devalued. And like, I am not fully realized as a person if people are being stripped of their dignity in my presence in my community. So like, those people are not part of my community, but like my community is being devalued because humanity is being devalued in my community. And the way I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen is by stepping in in order to protect those people, to keep those people safe, to show those people that fundamentally human dignity is guaranteed by other humans and not by other states.

[Mick]

Yeah, very well said. So I have one last example here. If there's too many examples for the listener, I apologize, but I just want to make it clear. So I've done my best to find examples and explain them.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mick]

The Sentinelese people in the Bay of Bengal, I think most of you have heard of them. They are like an indigenous people that are isolated on a single island and they've had little to no contact with the mainland or air quotes, Modern world. Yeah, I think in 2018 or something there was a missionary.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Every few years some bellend will try and go and give them the Bible and they'll kill them. Or fire arrows at them or.

[Mick]

Yeah, yeah, those people.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mick]

Now like I can't guarantee that this is how what is going on because I haven't spoken to them obviously. But I'm guessing that they don't speak of human rights and we the non sentinelese people don't really speak of their right to healthcare, their right to freedom of opinion. My point is more that like unless there is contact with them and they become like a political community, there are no really not any human rights for them to speak of or to uphold. Like in a sense they don't have human rights because there is no contact and nothing to uphold or enforce at this point. James, this is where we are going to isolate ourselves on an island until it is time for part two.

[James Stout]

Yeah, perfect.

[Mick]

Looking forward to seeing you very soon again for our next shin kicking badass.

[James Stout]

And I am fashioning a bow to defend us from Christian missionaries in boats.

[Mick]

Yes, let us also throw like spears and arrows at missionaries coming to our isolated island.

[James Stout]

Yeah,

[Mick]

It Could Happen. Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[James Stout]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.