The International Declaration of Independence for All Individuals
300 civilizations have come and gone on Earth, each time because the dynamic drive of the individual has been overwhelmed by governments and rulers increasingly desperate to control individuals. Increasing centralized control further erodes the rights and responsibilities of individuals, leading to anonymous collectivism and rule by opaque committees in which reasoning is specious and no individual is encouraged to contribute or held accountable.
The more you are forced to do things against your will, the less willing you are to extend yourself, to work and play, and the more miserable you become as the life is sucked out of yourself, your family, and society.
Brave souls have fought occasionally for human and civil rights over the eons, from great religious leaders to Cyrus the Great’s decrees 2,500 years ago, to the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the Nuremberg Code, and finally The Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued by the United Nations, each aimed at raising the individual from a cog to an increasingly self-determined and happy individual capable of being a model citizen.
These documents were each a great breakthrough but only partially successful because they were not truly inclusive of all mankind or of all rights due individuals for them to truly empower the individual; they listed rights while overlooking the needed responsibilities towards society; and because lawyers and judges subject to political pressure from vested interests disinterested in accommodating dissenters, were required to interpret those rights. Hence the need for a new Declaration of Independence for all individuals on Earth from the invariable descent into monolithic totalitarianism.
As different as we all are, we all share one trait that binds humanity together as fellow travelers on a small planet we call home—we are each an individual “me” with the same rights; any earnest discussion will prove almost all of them to be well-meaning and caring individuals, not as bad as advertised. This individual goodness is where the strength of humanity resides, the widespread realization of which all totalitarian governments know will be their undoing, as Ghandi, Mandela, and Martin Luther King for instance, proved. The time has come, therefore, to agree that no other individual has a right to deprive any other individual of their rights and freedoms through specious reasoning or force. When all individuals of good-will simply withdraw their participation from the distorted plans and actions of the few, and in numbers too vast for the enforcers to override, the decline of civilizations will cease as individuals, who alone are capable of bringing the needed initiative, interest, and life force to sustain civilization, will be free to manage ethically the real problems that confront mankind.
It is time humanity came of age and learned from its mistakes by working on the basis of the basic goodness of our fellows—even if buried very deep—and the need for ethical solutions. The only thing that can pierce plated armor and totalitarian states alike is an idea whose time has come. Be part of the solution by simply adding your signature to this Declaration and sharing it with as many others as possible. With enough daring to do so, mankind the world over can reverse this sad slide into a dystopian, high-tech feudal despotism and create from the growing pile of ashes a real Golden Age.
Rights and Responsibilities of Citizens and Governments
A fundamental truth essential to the success of individuals and society is that humankind has an inalienable right to liberty, freedom of choice, expression, and action as long as it does not encroach upon or suppress the liberty, freedom of choice, expression, or action of others.
All individuals have the right to decide what is beneficial or harmful in their lives and cannot be coerced by government-mandated solutions based upon vested interests or those arrogating unto themselves a monopoly on wisdom; each individual has a responsibility to be tolerant of diverging points of view, whether from individuals, groups, or governing bodies, and to work with them in a spirit of cooperation to discover the actual facts and determine an optimal solution.
Each individual has a right to speak freely without censorship and the duty to protect the free speech of others, for without communication, there is no life; each also has the right to remain silent; and to live his or her life without false information against them, and the duty to ignore any derogatory information about others they have not themselves confirmed to be true.
All individuals have value and something to contribute to society; they therefore are deserving of respect, nurturing, and support to increase the good they have to offer.
All humans have a right to, and a duty to help bring about, scientific and technical advances such as artificial general intelligence, robotics, and genetic engineering that enhance humankind’s ability to deal with life’s challenges; and not to have these designed to control and even replace humanity, nor to be forced on humankind without proper long-term-safety studies.
All individuals have the right to receive an education that builds on their personal interests, develops their ability to think for themselves, and prepares them with the necessary skills to succeed in life; they likewise have a responsibility to ensure education prepares the future generations to maintain and improve civilization.
All individuals have a right to keep their culture—accumulated wisdom, arts, philosophies, morals, traditions—developed through the best efforts of their forebears over centuries and have a duty to prevent efforts to negate that culture by undermining or degrading it during the education of the young, including indirectly by glorifying drug-use or immorality.
Parents have the right to determine the best interests of their children and not have that role usurped by a nanny state. Similarly, each parent has the duty to take only those actions that will, in their own estimation, benefit their children in the short- and long-term.
Each individual has the right to follow and practice his or her own creed, religious, political, or otherwise, and has the duty to respect the beliefs held by others.
Each individual has the right and responsibility to maintain his or her health and to pursue all possible solutions, with no particular health paradigm having the right to affect a monopoly.
Each individual has the right and duty to support, a limited, elected government designed and run by and for all the people using understanding, compassion, correct analysis devoid of agendas benefitting a few, common sense, sound management, and the encouragement and implementation of innovative solutions in addressing the pressing issues involved in running a country—rather than seeking to control the lives of individuals, families, and groups through the generation of fear and apathy.
Citizens have a right and a duty to insist upon a transparent relationship with their governing body based on trust and mutual assistance, for computerized files on citizens and constant surveillance by a State operating in secrecy lead to super control and manipulation of the reality and behavior of the majority according to the dictates of an elite and constitute a police state that can only fail as citizens cease to co-operate with the State.
Each individual has the right to privacy and security of his or her own person and possessions, free of search and seizure by criminals, gangs, or government agencies, and a duty to avoid engaging in any actions that are criminally harmful to others.
Until civilization is acting in harmony, citizens have the right to adequate means of self-defense from criminal individuals and gangs, as well as any foreign or domestic forces bent on nullifying the rights, freedoms, and powers of the individual; and a right and responsibility to require a police force that adheres to the articles of this Declaration.
Each individual has a right to innovative management of Earth’s support system with the goal of rebuilding the environment responsibly and thus supporting many billions of people; and a right to be free of the current agendas born out of frustration and fear that identify incorrect problems and develop flawed solutions, including the unnecessary goal of culling the population in the belief that it is expendable—a deep violation of human rights; each individual has a responsibility to steer companies and governments in the direction of protecting the environment while raising the standard of living for all citizens, as well as taking actions on a personal level in support of this drive. Humankind’s external enemies—from disease to meteor impact to loss of topsoil—make far better targets for the attention of humans than their fellows.
While individuals are not all created equal, they each have equal rights under the law and so equal rights to make the best of their lives given their abilities and interests; each individual has a responsibility to insist on this right for self and others.
Each individual has the right to swift justice based neither on precedent nor on prejudice but on the presentation of all the unadorned facts; and the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty by a jury of peers operating on those facts; each individual has the duty to provide others with the same level of justice, using Common Law courts if necessary.
Each individual has a right to, and responsibility to demand, a currency issued by the government in balance with the total value of goods and services available and which remains free of manipulation that creates hardships such as inflation, deflation, depression, and debt slavery, as well as being free of government control of the individual’s access to and use of that money.
Every individual has the right to assemble peaceably for whatever purpose, including campaigning against those in power, and the duty to protect these rights for all.
Every individual has the right to build his or her life successfully, to develop his or her own businesses and to keep all the proceeds of that work; and the duty to allow others the same freedom. These rights and duties extend to encouraging fair trade and removing any restrictions or subsidies that benefit monopoly seeking companies, those close to government, or unviable industries while adversely affecting producers and consumers.
Each individual has a right and responsibility to fund his or her government’s operations through a consumption tax, not an income tax that acts as a disincentive to producing.
Each individual has the duty to understand evil deeds are committed and to focus on removing the source of these, not punishing or rendering forever ineffective the individual who has fallen; thus each individual has a duty to insist prisons be places of rehabilitation and mental treatment be based on workable mental therapies, not physical “treatments” that disable the individual, and so make all such troubled and troublesome individuals productive members of society again. This duty is also a right should the individual find himself or herself in such straights.
Each individual has a right to media that informs the public accurately so they can think for themselves and act in a responsible way. Any individual working in the media has a responsibility to maintain constructive communications and avoid creating unnecessary fear in order to steer the public into thinking and acting in a specific way.
Each individual has the right to travel unhindered within their own country, without harassment or surveillance and the right to flee persecution and seek asylum in another; each individual has the duty to sustain such freedoms for others.
Citizens’ Committee, Earth, 2021
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