Rights are a fiction. No one really ‘has’ rights. We have putative access to such protections as we can defend — with power, influence or cash. Nothing more. That’s why they’re a fiction.

But the idea derives from unity, and mutual concern. This is to say: we will protect »each others’ rights, vigilantly, humanely, and intelligently. If this is not the case… the entire idea becomes self-ironizing.

Yet, in general, as misguided as our societies are, rights are a fiction that has some power to protect some few people from otherwise ubiquitous violation.

They cannot be protected by predators.

Nor can their current, half-counterfeited form actually protect us from violation; sometimes they reduce its frequency or severity.

If everyone is busy yelling about their right to act as an individual, the fabric from which our ideas of rights and protections emerge… is, itself, violated.

Thus it is that, ironically, concerns about rights can lead directly to their actual inversion. And replacement with something that mimics them, but provides the opposites of the protections actual rights occasionally succeed at delivering.