Again and again, we hear a large segment of our culture, especially the segment that fancies itself to be the most progressive, touting human rights. They talk about human rights in a fervent, religious manner and view human rights as the sine qua non of cultural values. They focus on who has rights and who doesn’t have rights, whose rights are more important and whose are less important, and they spend much of their lives protesting in order to get their human rights and make sure everyone has gotten equal rights then and now.
Political movement are keen on human rights, and these moments have now taken over our culture and most Western cultures. The women’s movement wants human rights for women; the civil rights movement wants human rights for blacks; the gay rights movement wants human right for gays; the newly formed trans movement wants human rights for its members. If they can only get their rights they apparently feel they will achieve true happiness.
Not only do they insist on their rights, but they also insist that the rights of other groups, such as conservatives, whites, men, and all who disagree with them, be curtailed. They argue that since their rights, in their own eyes, have been suppressed over the years while the rights of others have been advanced at their expense, they should now have more rights and the guilty groups should get fewer rights.
Lost in the furor over rights—and a very important second component of the achievement of happiness—is the necessary of human responsibility. And perhaps this is due, at least in America, to our very own beginnings, when our forefathers wrote that each human has the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Nowhere in the original documents that formed our nation, did it talk about how each person also has to take responsibility for their contribution to the good and the bad in their own lives and in the lives of others.
You often hear children arguing over their rights. One brother will say, “Jimmy got more candy than I did,” or one sister will complain, “Mary got a car when she was sixteen, but all I got was a thousand dollars for tuition.” An essential aspect of maturity is to recognize that being fair in life is not just about what you get, but also what you give. Maturity means not only looking at how others have deprived you or how others have done bad things to you or to the world, but also how you have deprived others and done bad things to others and to the world. Maturity means taking responsibility for not only your virtues, but also your faults.
“I have traveled the world and I have yet to find a man who could bring home the judgment against himself,” Confucius said. Socrates said it another way, “Know yourself.” Shakespeare noted, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Bruno Bettelheim proclaimed, “Blaming others, or outside conditions, for one’s own misbehavior, may be the child’s privilege; if an adult denies responsibility for his actions, it is another step towards personal disintegration.”
Most people throughout history and at the present time equate the achievement of happiness with attaining something: rights, status, wealth. But the attainment of rights in and of itself will not bring enduring happiness, contentment or peace. You can become the richest man or woman in the world, but if you have not understood yourself and taken responsibility for who you are and what energy you contribute to each person in your world and each facet of your life, you will not find peace.
Valarie Solanas was a feminist icon of the 1960s. She achieved her “fifteen minutes of fame” (a phrase coined by the artist, Andy Warhol, whom she murdered). Her name hit the news in 1967, when she self-published her famous SCUM Manifesto, The first sentence of this work read, “Life in this ‘society’ being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of ‘society’ being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.” In May of 1968, her notoriety rose considerably when she shot Warhol because, as she later said, “he had too much control of my life.”
Solanas is an extreme example of a person who was concerned about rights but not responsibilities. Solanas was born in 1936 in New Jersey. Her mother was a dental assistant and her father a bartender. She later claimed that her father sexually abused her as a child. Her parents divorced early on and she lived for a time with her mother and stepfather before being sent to live with her grandparents because her mother couldn’t stand her rebelliousness. She was always a rebel and suffered from paranoia later on and was hospitalized for a time in a mental institution. Following her stint with Any Warhol, she became a member of the National Organization for Women. Ti-Grace Atkinson, a chapter president of NOW, declared Solanas as “the first outstanding champion of women’s rights”and “a ‘heroine’ of the feminist movement.”
Throughout her life, Solanas attempted to liberate herself and attain her rights as a woman by fighting for radical causes and attempting to eliminate enemies such as Warhol. She lived a chaotic life in which she was always restless and always blaming others for that chaos and never taking responsibility for it. She had a son, named David, who was taken away from her by the courts, and she never attempted to see him again. She never sought out psychotherapy or in any way tried to look honestly at herself. She died homeless of pneumonia in a cheap hotel at the age of 52.
Unfortunately, a lot of the turbulence and antagonism in the world is caused by people who are intent on their rights. And such people can succeed in achieving happiness for a while, if they force others to see things their way. But those who know themselves and do whatever they can to find happiness for themselves and others, without forcing anybody to do anything or putting down those who do not see things their way, are the ones whose happiness endures.
Mind Sight 