tweto https://x.com/souljagoyteller/status/2085558616992444753
more takes
Natural rights are what guides my politics. The social contract exists to both protect people and protect their rights, and governments should be toppled when they void said rights. The thing that separates man from animal is that God delivered us with the privilege of basic rights
other poster: where do these natural rights come from?
sami gold: 1. God 2. Human existence
Is this not that far removed from the concept of the Mandate of Heaven? You can make it compatible if you approach it from the correct angle. You can even convince them that the existing capitalist powers have broken that mandate and need to be overthrown.
These dudes probably aren’t saying this in good faith but there’s probably some people that are.
Nah, people conflate the Mandate of Heaven with European Divine Right of Kings.
While they both seem to be using the divine to justify the legitimacy of the ruler, they differ in how they relate to said ruler losing legitimacy.
The Divine Right of Kings precludes any thought about removing the monarch as taboo and expects unconditional obedience.
The Mandate of Heaven is used to explain why certain rulers get overthrown by peasant rebellions and others don’t (either the peasants don’t even try, or they’re unsuccessful). Basically getting overthrown means losing the Mandate of Heavens, resisting the rebellion proves holding it.
The Mandate of Heaven ultimately says the legitimacy of rule comes from the consent of the ruled.
I can only speak from my limited reading, but the Daoist meaning appears more like “you’ve clearly fucked up - so either get a grip, or retire to be a fisherman”.
The heavens show displeasure through famine, banditry, unrest, etc - which is to say all the things that result from poor governance. Not keeping your generals under control results in corruption and theft, meaning extortion of the farmers, reducing food security, and turning merely poor weather into apocalyptic punishments.
At which point your rulership is fair game for someone who can fix your mess, humble warlords, and feed people.
Afaik, the Mandate of Heaven is basically the approval of a monarch by the divine as legitimating their authority. It’s not really a social contract except in sort of a “right to work” sense where the divine holds all the cards and is merely condescending to tentatively accepting your appointment until it changes its mind. There are said to be conditions, but it’s not any observable objective metric that defines whether you have lost legitimacy or not (e.g. certain specific actions that you did or did not do), it is the declaration of Heaven in the form of various manifestations of ill fortune.
I welcome correction from someone more familiar with this topic.