Freedom

if governments and corporations succeed in hacking the human animal, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will… Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have… Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc. – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have

– Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Natural Law: Do all you have agreed to do and, do not encroach on other persons or their property

Under Natural Law, to be valid, any law or court decision must agree with these 17 words. In one form or another, the 17 words go back at least 4,000 years, and are taught by all religions. I’ve never found an exception.

Made-up law is political. Whatever the lawmakers decide is right, or wrong, is right or wrong.

In democracies, the lawmaking privilege is owned by the majority. If the majority or their representatives decide to declare something right or wrong, then so be it. And, there is no limit to the laws the lawmakers can cook up. That’s why the federal government alone has 300,000 laws, and the average American commits three felonies per day. Felony means at least a year in prison.

’The more laws, the less justice,’ warned Roman lawyer Cicero, who died two years before the Republic did. ”

— Richard Maybury

But what exactly did Jefferson mean by pursuit of happiness?

— Timothy J. Shannon (link)

Perhaps the answer lies in the Constitution. The Bill of Rights gave tangible form to the natural rights of life and liberty. The right to life is expressed in prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment and unlawful imprisonment. The right to liberty is laid out in freedoms of religion, speech, and assembly.

But the framers never attempted to define happiness in the Bill of Rights, nor did they guarantee it to anyone elsewhere in the Constitution.

Is it possible that Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness” was just a rhetorical flourish, a bit of purposefully vague window dressing inserted to give universal appeal to the colonists’ cause against King George III?

If that was Jefferson’s intent, he certainly succeeded – we are far more likely to quote Jefferson’s distillation of Lockean principles in the Declaration’s second paragraph than anything contained in the long list of grievances that makes up the rest of the document.

However, Jefferson was not alone when he wrote about happiness. Many of his contemporaries pondered the same issue: What is happiness and what is the best way for individuals and societies to pursue it?

The short answer that Jefferson and other Enlightenment thinkers came up with was that happiness had its roots in humankind’s inherent capacity for reason and desire for material security. Reason was the faculty that enabled humans to manipulate and control their environment. It was the means by which they pursued individual and collective improvement. The “Creator” gave humans reason because he wanted them to be happy. (All those T-shirts to the contrary, Benjamin Franklin never said that beer was the divine gift intended to make us happy, but he did write, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.”)

In Jefferson’s world, reasonable people pursued happiness by migrating from poverty and deprivation in the Old World to the natural bounty of the New. They pursued happiness by adopting new techniques that improved crop yields and livestock breeding. They built ships, roads, and canals that opened new markets and sped commerce.

Happiness meant being able to provide for your family without fear of famine, incessant warfare, or an exploitive aristocracy. In his essay “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” Franklin called this condition a “general happy mediocrity.” Today, we call it a stable, middle-class society, where people who work hard can reasonably expect freedom and prosperity for themselves and their children.

With that context in mind, Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness” becomes much more than a pleasing turn of phrase. It was a remarkably succinct expression of the American dream, a confident look to the future rather than a backward nod to Locke. As such, it remains foundational to how we define ourselves as a nation.

…

Pursuing happiness doesn’t mean we get it, but abandoning the pursuit seems a much worse alternative.”