It Could Happen Here - What's Wrong with Human Rights

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Mick and James discuss the concept of Human Rights and how they sometimes fail to ensure people around the world are treated with dignity. Sources: Human Rights as Moral Progress? A Critique by Jarett ZigonCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 28, Issue 4, pp. 716–736. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/cuan.12034 Agamben, Arendt and Human Rights: Bearing Witness to the Human. 2012John Lechte & Saul NewmanState of Exception. 2005Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind Simone Weil. Routledge Classics 2002 Philosophize This! - Episode #191: The Modern Day Concentration Camp and the Failure of Human Rights by Stephen WestSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I have never told this story. This must have been tucked deep, deep in the Jeremy Lynn file. My name is MC Jen. I'm excited to tell you about laugh, but not least. chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times. These will be conversations that remind us all, life is hard, laugh harder. Listen and laugh but not least with MC Jen on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 need 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 concept 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 unnu nuanced, it is to make it widely available. And with dead, 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? Hey, good. I'm good. I'm excited about this. you know, 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, yeah, these things can get away from me. 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 ethical 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, The latter is like 4Mega Q 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. Yeah, convention. Most likely 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. So, yeah. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in 1948 by the UN. Then, 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 a stone. weeks. Later, it was also explicitly named by Roman philosophers, which they probably stole from the Greeks. 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 Zubay, not 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. Yeah, as opposed to God or gods. Right.

Exactly. There's something innate or something by virtue of being human that gives you those rights. Yeah. 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, a state, a state 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 death the authority to which you handed 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, wherever people refer back to the social contract. It's like, I didn't agree to anything. I must have missed that meeting, but... Yeah, it relies on this thought experiment, right? Like this idea of, like, would someone in exit,

circumstance, do why thing. This is what Hobbes does, right? Yes. Like, I guess Hobbs, Locke and Rousseau would be the people you'd want to read if you wanted to learn more about this. In Rajava, 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 Rajava as opposed to requiring like universal consensus to be to be established. Once again, Rojava is leading the way. Yeah, he's showing us all the way. But that's right to be unusual. Yeah. We will be touching a little bit on Hobbes and Rousseau.

Okay. Fun. But to sum the latter bit up, like the virtue of being born, hardly checks my boxes for active consent. But, you know, I think there's some bureaucrat 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 Hobbs and our core to our contemporary understanding of like social and political theory and are also foundational to like most liberal democracies.

The ideas is following. First, there was like no state and no authority and everyone was in a state of nature where UN existence was harsh and brute and short. Yeah. Nasty brutish and short is the like, here's the exact words. Hobbs quite against deployed a lot about people and things. Yes. ignoring the fact that Hobbs was an idiot.

Yeah, and that life without the state is not nasty, brutish, and short, and we have a lot of examples of this. 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. 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. Yeah, because we need the authority and you need the social contract because otherwise humanity is just subject to its own worst impulses, like a hunger game 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 specialized government forces in order to use the violence that is necessary to maintain order. As a small side note, the whole state of nature thing is pretty much bullshit on why that is discussed at length in the dawn of everything by David Graber and David Wengro. But it would be way too much to also include here. You'd have to listen to me all week. I do have an audio book of the dawn of everything, and it is.

It's a lot of audiobook. Yeah, it's such a massive book, just massive. Yeah. Just as a small clarification before we move on. There are many more notable figures who've written about like natural rights, Francis Hutchin, Hegel, and Thomas Spain. 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.

I'll just skip that, including the parts where Jefferson was pretty selective on who counted as a human being and who didn't. Many such cases, yeah. Many such cases. Unfortunately, it has not gone away as much as it should have. Yeah. 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. You have to fight me for them.

I'm not surrendering the monopoly on chickens. Yes, you know where I live. You can Fedax them to me. So what has happened is by putting these natural rights into law, we can make them 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 that 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, they're 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 you 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 like the International Bill of Human Rights and several different treaties with all 193 UN member states as of now assigning at least one or more of those treaties. Yeah, I can't understate how massive that achievement is. Yeah. 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 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 the actual motivations were oil resources and more regional control. Because of course, yeah. Russia has also used human rights as a reason for invading. You look very surprised at that shapes. I was about to say the same thing. Russia loves to do this. 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 like 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 motivation seemed a bit more muddled because it appears there's some genuine concern there for human rights or humanitarian aid.

But again, muddled limited time. And I think like it's always telling like where St. decides that it's important to go to war for human rights and where they don't, right? Yeah. We're very selective when these rights need to be enforced or when there's violence needed for it to be enforced. Yeah, no one's rolling out to defend the human rights of Rohingya people in Myanmar, for example. No, exactly.

And 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. Yeah. And like a very well-lucidated appeal to like R2P, right, the right to protect, I think. I'd have to check. Responsibility to protect is 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 best of my understanding of it anyway. And this is, as it's been strange to me, by many, many young people in me. Emma. 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, like 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, question mark, will intervene to protect those rights. So, like, you saw signs explicitly calling on ASEAN, on, on the UN, on the European Union, on the United States. And 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 any matter in so far 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. So the rights-based discourse 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 fault for them, not because the rights enforced themselves or any other state decided to enforce.

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, nah, they get it close their rights and there is. But they were unalienable, so. Yeah, great. They still technically had them sort of maybe. Right. Yeah.

they should have bought the premium package. And also, yes, the U.S. 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. Well, it was much, again, oil and influence. As it always is, which is why you will now have to listen to ads. So cool, soon media can get some much needed oil and influence. Nice. Canadian women are looking for more.

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He accidentally sent her a photo of the kid's Christmas gifts with a delivery to another woman at the bottom. He exposed himself? That's a rookie move. Couples massages, monogrammed bath robes, and lingerie he then moored her for. So she spent four weeks gathering evidence and taped a 10-page letter inside his luggage before he flew out. In his luggage, she came to play.

And the second he landed, he blocked her. So she called the hotel room directly and got the mistress on the phone. Ooh, she got the mistress live on the phone? That is a bold move. Let's see if it pays off. Then it gets worse. He took the mistress on the Bahamas honeymoon trip

he had planned with his wife. And then the mistress tagged him on Facebook, outing the fare to her entire family. That's like a whole public confession. And spoiler, two years later, karma hits him so hard. calling his ex-wife in tears saying about the mistress, what a mistake that was.

To find out what happened, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHR radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everybody, it's the Jonas Brothers. This week on the podcast, Hey, Jonas, we're so excited to be hanging out with Mika Abdallah from the hit show off campus.

Congratulations on the massive show and massive success. Got through about episode five. I left the next morning to go meet the guys. Came back, it was like, cool, let's pick up where we left off. And that series had been completed. without me. Oh no. That's like the number one rule of watching something. It's literally cheating. It's cheating. That's crazy. We talk about what it's been like watching the show become such a massive hit. What's next for season two? And just how close the off-campus cast really is.

We're genuinely so close. What's the group chat called? If you can say, if it's allowed to be said on the pod. That's a great question. One of them is off-campus Brazil. Okay. Love it. Shout up Brazil. Shout out Brazil. And then the boys have their own group chat called Dean's bha. Our conversation with Mika Abdallah is out now.

Go check it out. Listen to Hey Jonas in the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back, now loaded with Petro Dollars. 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, She was with the Derruti column in the international group. She burned herself frying eggs in a farmhouse that they liberated and had to go home. Yeah, she is a fascinating figure. Yeah, someone who just like forest gumps through like a history of amazing things in that time period. Yes, it was like, I have written this down in the script, but when she was eight or nine, she like 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. Amazing. I didn't know that. Like she taught at the 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 near-sighted. They were like, yeah, we don't trust you with this machine gun, which fair. Yeah.

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 refuse to eat more. As her biographer, Richard Rees 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. Well, that's a bad ass in my book. Yeah, yeah.

It's a cool way of phrasing, too. It's a beautiful sentence. Yeah. 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, like, we as human beings require to thrive, food, shelter, medicine, but also like 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 justice out there. This may seem

like a very theoretical difference, but let me illustrate what I think is a very strong example of 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. And just feel free to respond. What if someone were to be forced into prostitution, either by coercion or violence? Okay. Why is that wrong?

Why is that disgusting and abhorrent? Yeah, for many reasons. 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? But 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. 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.

Yeah. Your first instinct just to say like, oh, geez, that's fucked up. Yeah, that's wrong. And it is wrong because what you're doing is 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 pointing to a law 23 subsection to paragraph 3, whatever. And we can put it in a more concrete example, like the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Aedwood. In short, for those who are not familiar with either the book of 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 divorced 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?

Yeah, like, I guess we can argue the same thing in the Islamic State, right? There were people who were forced into, into slavery, sexually assaulted. Sexual violence was commonplace. It was at least accepted. I'm not familiar with the exactly 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.

Yeah. It was still disgusting, right? which is why people, including people in Kurdistan, decided to take up arms against it. And very rightfully so. Yeah. I guess their like universal human rights were violated, but their rights under the Islamic State and so much as that was a state, which it was, were not.

Yeah, and we'll get there because there's like a difference between having universal rights and having a sovereign that is going to prospect them. Yeah. 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. 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. Yeah. 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. 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. Whale and myself would say it's wrong because we have an obligation to others to respect them.

That by 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? Is it the products and services, the support this podcast? It definitely is. Yeah, they already have. Listen. And you're there for heart-wrenching knockouts. The world's biggest stage. And breathtaking triumph. 2026 FIFA World Cup. The knockout stage.

Every moment. Listen on TSN Radio. Join the globe. On the road to the July 19th final. 2026 FIFA World Cup. Stream it all live on TSN Radio. Available on IHeard Radio. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of the... that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer,

and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was in intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband is currently on a vacation with his mistress and I'm confronting them. Tell me, Sophia, how did she even catch them? One Amazon shopping receipt. He accidentally sent her a photo of the kids' Christmas gifts with a delivery to another woman at the bottom.

He exposed himself? That's a rookie move. Couples massages, monogrammed bath robes, and lingerie he then moored her for. So she spent four weeks gathering evidence and taped a 10-page letter inside his luggage before he flew out. In his luggage, she came to play. And the second he landed, he blocked her. So she called the hotel room directly and got the mistress on the phone. Ooh, she got the mistress live on the phone?

That is a bold move. Let's see if it pays off. Then it gets worse. He took the mistress on the Bahamas honeymoon trip he had planned with his wife. And then the mistress tagged him on Facebook, outing the fair to her entire family. That's like a whole public confession. And spoiler, two years later, karma hits him so hard. He's calling his ex-wife in tears saying about the mistress.

What a mistake that was. To find out what happened, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everybody, it's the Jonas Brothers. This week on the podcast, Hey Jonas. we're so excited to be hanging out with Mika Abdallah from the hit show off campus. Congratulations on the massive show and massive success. Got through about episode five. I left the next morning to go meet the guys.

Came back. It was like, cool, let's pick up where we left off. And that series had been completed without me. Oh, no. That's like the number one rule of watching something. It's literally cheating. It's crazy. We talk about what it's been like watching the show become such a massive hit.

What's next for season two? And just how close the off-campus cast really is. We're genuinely so close. What's the group chat called? If you can say, if it's allowed to be said on the pot. That's a great question. One of them is off-campus Brazil. Okay, love it.

Shout up Brazil. Shout up Brazil. And then the boys have their own group chat called Dean's Bs. Our conversation with Mika Abdallah is out now. Go check it out. Listen to Hey Jonas in the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back after the identity crush. stream of surdocts and prodasses or whatever.

So 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 Simoneville 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 this value rights in relation to the queen okay there is a relational aspect here that defines whatsoever for who you are being seen as an object here means that you exist like 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 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 like linear and nature or relation. Yeah. I fear this next part could be rather complex, but I'll do my best to go into like layman's terms. It evolves some pretty complex philosophy about authors whom many people have read, but you 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 offers and I probably wouldn't recommend reading them. So we're speaking of Hannah Arendt and Georgio Agamben. I 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. Iran uses this terms Zoe and BIOS for this, like the Greek terms.

Okay. 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. Okay. 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 bias, meaning a life that has meaning and that is political,

it becomes less obvious that that person alone in the mountains, like can be recognized as human. Sure, yeah, like part of being human is being part of a community, right? Like, we only are able to fully realize ourselves in the context of other people. Exactly. And that is what I'm getting at. We're not saying that this person in the boundaries is not a human being, but they're isolated and not. not part of a community.

Think of making meaningful moments together with, like, those dear to you. That is in a sense the meaning that the term bias kind of points to. Yeah. Living alone in the woods also means, like, there's no community or no sovereign power to hold someone accountable or to uphold. They're supposedly unalienable rights. As a little pointer between, I'm going to use, like, 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 use 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 in nuanced lens to look through. And if we look through this, 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 right, 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 like being part of a community. Yeah. 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 bias, 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. Sometimes, like, they're able to act collectively to protect each other, right? Like, within that, but that is a different thing, right? that's, I guess you could call the obligation, right?

That is their obligation to each other that they are fulfilling when they do that, right? Like, as you say, that no powerful entity is obliged to protect their rights. You could look at the example of outdoor detention in the US, right? I remember once I was out feeding people in outdoor detention. I was with prop, actually. He also has a podcast on this network. And we ran into this guy, he had like a polo on. And I said, the fuck, you didn't, who the fuck is this?

They had like nice shoes. And I was like, what's happening out here? Guy was from the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. Because you have a bunch of rights in the US, right? That person came along and they had a clipboard and they did a bunch of stuff and it didn't matter, right? 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, yeah, it was us fulfilling our obligations to each other, not their theoretical rights under the state which mattered. Exactly. And just to point out, like, they're 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. Yeah, exactly. Like, and is it Locke, who does us not for whom the bell tolls it tolls it, maybe not. Hemingway? Hemingway wrote the book but it's based on

oh man shit we got to Google this because otherwise that's not for him the bell tolls John done 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 funeral bell, right? 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. Very well said. 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. 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. Yeah, every few years some Bell End will try and go and give them the Bible and they'll kill them or fire arrows at them. Yeah. Yeah. Those people.

Yeah. 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 unless there is contact with them and they become like a political community,

there are really not any human rights for them to speak of 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, Jane, this is where we are going to isolate ourselves on an island until it is time for part two. Yeah, perfect. Looking forward to seeing you very soon again for our next shin-kicking badass. And I am fashioning a boat to defend us from Christian missionaries in boats.

Yes. Let us also throw like spears and arrows at missionaries coming to our isolated island. Yeah. 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. Joy is essential and it's also elusive, but now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence.

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