In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right, the Declaration of Independence rests on a flawed picture of man, and its most famous sentence claims more than it can deliver.
Start with “self-evident.” Jefferson (1743-1826) calls the equality of men and their unalienable rights truths that any mind can see. Mearsheimer ranks reason last among the three sources of our preferences, behind innate sentiment and socialization. The truths feel self-evident because Jefferson and his readers share a Lockean, Protestant, Anglo inheritance. Reason has little to do with it. A Confucian scholar or a Bedouin chief would not find them obvious. “Self-evident” shrinks to “self-evident to men raised as we were raised.”
Then the universalism. All men created equal, each carrying the same inherent rights. Mearsheimer says we are tribal from birth, formed by a group before we can assert ourselves, ready to sacrifice for our own and to draw hard lines against outsiders. The Declaration’s universal claim describes an aspiration, not how men behave. The case sat in the room. The men who wrote that all men are equal held slaves and counted most of mankind outside the circle. The tribe showed through the creed at once.
Next the rights themselves. The Declaration treats the individual as primary, the bearer of rights before and against the state. Mearsheimer reverses the order. The group comes first. The individual arrives into a society that already exists and that made him. On that view rights are not natural facts lodged in lone men. A society grants them, recognizes them, enforces them. Strip away the society and the inalienable right has no one to honor it.
Jefferson does not say reason finds these rights. He says the Creator endows them. He hedges against pure rationalism by grounding rights in God. The appeal to the Creator is its own product of a particular religious formation. The theology does not escape the problem. It moves it.
Consent of the governed runs into the same wall. The Declaration pictures free men constituting a government by agreement. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says societies do not begin when atomistic individuals contract. The founders were already one people: English speakers, common-law heirs, Protestants, colonists with a thick shared past. The consent was the act of a people already made, not of bare men meeting to invent a nation.
A limit. The Declaration works as a political act, not only as a report on human nature. Even granting the false anthropology, the document does its job. The universal language bound thirteen quarrelsome colonies and claimed standing before the world.
A founding myth that unifies a people at home turns dangerous when a state reads it as a mandate to remake the world. The line runs from 1776 to liberal hegemony. All men hold the same rights, so every nation deserves liberal democracy, so we will help install it. Other peoples are tribal too. They resist the gift. The universalism that steadies the republic at home becomes the delusion that wrecks its statecraft abroad. If Mearsheimer is right about man, the Declaration is safest as Americans’ own creed and most ruinous as a blueprint for mankind.
Sacred Values & Convenient Beliefs
Begin with the status game the colonists cannot win as subjects. A subject who refuses the tax and takes up arms against his king is a traitor. That is the only name the game allows him. Stated as interest, the colonial cause reads as theft. We keep our money. We keep our land. We govern ourselves and answer to no one across the sea. A candid world hears a propertied class guarding its property and calls the men criminals. The sacred value changes the name of the game. The colonist no longer refuses a duty. He defends a right the Creator gave him. Tyranny stands where the Crown stood. The traitor becomes a free man, and the king becomes the lawbreaker.
David Pinsof argues that a sacred value is a cover story that keeps a status game from collapsing into its ugly truth. Name the dominance motive and the game ends in shame. So the colonists deny the motive. They do not seek power. They defend rights. They do not grab advantage. They answer to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. The famous line about a decent respect to the opinions of mankind performs the move inside the sentence. It tells the world the colonists act for a principle any man can see, not for the gain any man can guess.
Turner supplies the half Pinsof leaves implicit. The cover story works because the men wearing it do not know it is a cover story. A convenient belief is sincere. Jefferson does not wink as he writes. He means every word. The belief that rights are natural and the king a usurper reaches him below the level of argument, absorbed from Locke, from Whig pamphlets, from dissenting pulpits, from a common-law training that treats liberty as the Englishman’s birthright. He does not reason his way to the creed. He inherits it as sight. It feels like perception, like naming a fact in front of him, and a man cannot see his own perception as a convenience. The hiding is built in. Strip the sincerity and the value dies. The mask only works on a face that takes itself for a face.
This is why the naked interest claim recruits no one. Men do not pledge their lives and fortunes to dodge a tax. They pledge to a sacred value, and other men join because they read the pledge as sincere. The sincerity travels where the interest stays home. France weighs the rebellion and finds a principle it can dress its own ambition in, which a tax revolt could never supply. The convenience depends on the blindness. A man who saw the whole transaction could not run it.
A sacred value also costs something, and the cost shows it is more than paint. Wide recruiting needs a wide claim. The colonists could not write that all propertied Englishmen are equal. The creed says all men. The statement overshoots the interest that prompts it, and the overshoot binds the men who sign. They commit in public to more than they hold in private. A value that only masked need not overreach. This one does, because the recruiting power lives in the breadth.
The man who writes that all men are created equal owns other men. The planter does not argue the slave out of manhood in the same room where he writes the creed. The categories that exclude the slave reach him absorbed, never examined, kept in a separate compartment the creed never visits. That separation is the convenience. The belief serves him by staying below the question. He need not reconcile the equality he proclaims with the bondage he profits from, because the two never meet in his mind.
The document wears its two layers on its face. The preamble is sacred value. The long charge sheet against the king is interest: the taxes, the troops quartered in homes, the trade strangled, the assemblies dissolved, the courts bent. The art lies in the join. The king does more than tax. He violates a right. Interest gets told as principle betrayed, grievance as sacrilege. The lower layer borrows the authority of the upper.
Last, the durability. The grievances died with the man they named. The sacred value outlived him because it became the convenient belief of the nation it founded. Each generation inherits the creed the way Jefferson inherited his, below argument, as sight. It serves the republic as it served the colonists. It turns American interest into American principle and hides the turning from the men who perform it. The value stays sincere because it stays tacit. That is the engine, and it still runs.
Alliance Theory makes one demand of the Declaration. Stop reading it for values and read it for alliances. The paper holds that belief systems grow out of alliance structures, not out of abstract principles, and that the line between camps marks whom men count as allies rather than what they claim to prize. Point that at 1776 and the document changes shape.
Start with the coalition, because the coalition comes first. The thirteen colonies make strange bedfellows. Massachusetts Congregationalists, Virginia Anglican planters who own men, Pennsylvania Quakers and merchants, Carolina rice growers, Scots-Irish debtors on the frontier. By the paper’s first cue, similarity, these men make poor allies. They differ in faith, in trade, in manners, in interest. Shared values pull nothing together. A shared rival does. The Crown and Parliament tax them, garrison them, and shut their courts, and the enemy of each colony’s enemy becomes each colony’s friend. Transitivity does the binding. Each colony’s quarrel with London turns every other colony’s quarrel into its own. Interdependence finishes the work. No colony can face the empire alone, and a man without allies stands at everyone’s mercy, so thirteen weak challengers pool into one. The Continental Congress is a super-alliance, a coalition of coalitions, held by a common rival and not a common creed.
Name the kind of alliance and the document clarifies. Against Britain the patriots run a revolutionary alliance, lower-ranked challengers against an established higher rank. Inside their own ranks they run a bridging alliance, high-rank planters and merchants yoked to low-rank farmers and artisans, each gaining what neither holds alone. The planter brings standing and money. The farmer brings numbers and muskets. The creed that binds them stays broad enough to cover both, which is why the document reaches for the widest claim in reach and says all men.
The coalition was not fated. A softer ministry, no Coercive Acts, no Quebec Act, and the alliance might never have set. The split ran through the population, not around it. Loyalists chose the Crown, and the sharp common knowledge the paper describes, the shared sense of who stands on which side, hardened through 1775 and 1776 until the line lay plain. The Declaration arrives to fix that line in words and to rationalize a realignment already underway. Elites narrate the shift as principle after the alliances have formed.
Read the preamble as patchwork. The document appeals to the rights of Englishmen, to natural and universal rights, to the consent of the governed, and to the providence of a Protestant God, principles that do not sit inside one philosophy and do not need to. Each draws a different bloc. The lawyer hears the rights of Englishmen. The dissenter hears providence. The radical hears nature and equality. The principles bend to the coalition. They recruit.
Now the function. The document names its audience in its own text, a candid world. Its work is to mobilize third parties and to embolden allies, and the paper names the move. Build common knowledge that your side is moral and the other side is not, and you draw the undecided and free your allies to strike the rival without shame. The Declaration manufactures that common knowledge in a page.
Watch the victim biases run. The grievance list is competitive victimhood in its purest colonial form. The colonists stress the king’s personal responsibility, deny him any mitigating circumstance, assign him a settled malevolent design, and embellish the harm. He does not respond to defiance. He pursues absolute Tyranny through a long train of abuses aimed at absolute Despotism. The costs of the late war with France, which the taxes were meant to defray, fall away. The colonies’ own provocations fall away. What remains is a wronged people and a tyrant, the victim’s account told from one chair.
The perpetrator biases cover the allies. The same men say nothing of their handling of Loyalists, nothing of the mobs and the seizures, nothing of the slaves they hold while they write that men are equal. Jefferson’s draft runs the cleaner version of the move. It charges the king with the slave trade, lifting the sin off the planter and setting it on the rival. Shift the blame to the enemy and your ally comes out clean. Congress struck the passage, and the impulse behind it is the textbook perpetrator bias turned on one’s own side.
The attributions sort by allegiance. The colonists’ virtues run internal and their rebellion runs external. They are a patient, freedom-loving people, good by disposition, forced to revolt by the king’s design rather than drawn to it by ambition. The king’s acts run the other way, internal and malevolent by nature. Their rivals’ allies draw the harshest read of all. Britain arms native nations on the frontier, and the document calls them merciless Indian savages, irrational malevolence assigned to the enemy’s friends while the colonists’ own seizure of native land stays off the page. Self-serving attribution, applied to the coalition.
The universal claim is the tell. All men are created equal reads, in this frame, the way egalitarian language reads across the paper, as a tool to mobilize support for the coalition and not an impartial rule that cuts through every group. The proof sits in who the principle leaves out. The signers do not extend it to the men they own, to the natives they drive west, or to the neighbors who keep faith with the Crown. Support for the universal stops where the coalition’s interest stops. Allegiance comes first and the professed value follows, the order the paper finds again and again.
Symmetry comes last. Alliance Theory expects both sides to run the same biases, and Britain obliges. The Crown’s writers cast the colonists as ungrateful smugglers and lawless mobs, virtue claimed and vice assigned from the opposite side. The frame crowns no winner on principle. Each side magnifies its own grievance and excuses its own transgressions because each side carries the same alliance psychology. France settles the point from outside. A Catholic absolute monarchy bankrolls a Protestant republic of rights, strange bedfellows by every measure of similarity, joined by the one thing that joins allies in this account, a shared rival across the Channel.
The Declaration, then, is the charter of a contingent coalition dressed as a statement of timeless right. Its principles map its alliances. Read it for values and it reads as philosophy. Read it for allies and rivals, as the paper insists, and it reads as a coalition’s brief to a candid world.
A sacred value works while one thing stays hidden, the gap between the value and the conduct. Pinsof’s definition holds that the value is a cover story built to keep a status game from collapsing. The cover holds while no one forces that gap into common knowledge. The trouble built into the form is that the maker says the value out loud, to a candid world, in universal words. Each of those three features makes the cover strong. Each arms the men it shuts out.
Take them in turn. The value is sincere. The makers believe it, which is what lets it recruit, and which is also what traps them. A man who states a value he privately scorns can drop it when it costs him and lose only a lie. A man who states a value he believes cannot drop it without confessing he was never the man he claimed. Sincerity locks the cage.
The value is public. The colonists put it on the record before the world. A claim on the record belongs to anyone who can read it. The slave reads all men are created equal as plainly as the planter does. Once the words are out, the maker stops controlling who picks them up.
The value is universal in form. All men. The form of the claim already holds the slave, the woman, the man without property. The exclusion lives in the conduct, not in the text. So the excluded party invents nothing. He reads the sentence aloud and points at the practice. The contradiction sits in the open and waits.
Now the move. Frederick Douglass runs it in 1852. He does not throw the Declaration away. He picks it up. He grants the value its full force, calls the founders’ principles saving principles, and then sets the slaveholding republic beside its own creed and lets the gap speak. He asks what the Fourth of July means to the slave and answers that the day measures the distance between the nation’s word and the nation’s deed. The speech works because he takes the sacred value as real and binding. Reject it and he holds no lever. Accept it and the republic stands convicted by its own founding sentence.
Lincoln runs the same move at Gettysburg. He turns the preamble into the nation’s founding proposition and the war into the labor of making the deed match the word. He holds the living to the stated value of the dead.
King calls in the note in 1963. He names the Declaration a promissory note, a written guarantee of unalienable rights to all men, and charges the republic with default. He comes to collect. Again he grants the value, again he shows the gap, again the creed indicts the men who failed it.
See what the three share. Each one takes the sacred value as sincere, public, and universal, the very features that made it a serviceable cover, and turns each feature into an edge. Sincerity means the nation cannot wave the creed off as mere talk without confessing fraud. Publicity means the words already sit on the record to be quoted back. Universality means the excluded man stands inside the sentence and has only to step forward. The cover story arms the very men it shut out.
This is the collapse Pinsof describes, aimed with care. Common knowledge of the gap threatens to expose the whole creed as a status play, the one outcome a sacred value exists to prevent. The maker’s heirs feel the threat and scramble. They try to keep the prestige of the value while ducking its demand. They say the creed covers some men only. They say the slave is not fully a man. They say equality means equality before God, not before the law. They say the principle names a distant hope, not a present rule. Each evasion is a scramble to a nearby game where the value still confers standing yet no longer binds. The abolitionist’s task is to shut those exits and hold common knowledge on the plain sense of the words.
The trap resets each generation. The value stays on the books, so the move runs again whenever a new group finds itself outside the circle. The women at Seneca Falls in 1848 rewrote the sentence to read that all men and women are created equal and held the republic to the amended line. The sacred value becomes a standing weapon, ready in the hand of whoever stands excluded at the time.
Here is why the cynical read alone misses it. Pure cynicism says the value covers an interest and stops there, which implies the value is decoration the makers could discard at will. They cannot discard it. A public, sincere, universal cover story is a hostage handed to the future. It binds the giver and arms his victims. The cynicism gets the birth right, a cover for a coalition’s interest. It misses the career, the cover gathering force of its own and turning on the men who built it. The yield comes from holding both at once. The men who wrote the creed meant it to guard their standing, and in other hands it convicted them, and both facts hold of the same sentence.
