{"id":191485,"date":"2026-06-05T12:24:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T20:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=191485"},"modified":"2026-06-05T14:18:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T22:18:41","slug":"the-declaration-of-independence-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=191485","title":{"rendered":"The Declaration of Independence"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy 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\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and 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. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right, the Declaration of Independence<\/a> rests on a flawed picture of man, and its most famous sentence claims more than it can deliver.
\nStart 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.”
\nThen 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.
\nNext 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.
\nJefferson 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.
\nConsent 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.
\nA 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.
\nA 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.<\/p>\n

Sacred Values<\/a> & Convenient Beliefs<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.
\nDavid Pinsof argues<\/a> 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.
\nTurner 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<\/a> 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<\/a>. 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.
\nThis 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<\/a> depends on the blindness. A man who saw the whole transaction could not run it.
\nA 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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
\nLast, the durability. The grievances died with the man they named. The sacred value outlived him because it became the convenient belief<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=191485"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191512,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191485\/revisions\/191512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=191485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=191485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=191485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}