A university president makes a case against cowardice

> Everything we have, everything we're permitted to do, is at the pleasure and permission of our governments.

Wrong! The people are ultimately responsible for reigning-in their governments and are the ultimate source of any rules or rights that the governments end up enforcing.

If you think that the ultimate authority is with the government, then you have justified every authoritarian regime out there.

There are two basic world views.

One is based on order and rule. You have a leviathan, an absolute ruler, who imposes order on society.

The other is one based on freedom and law/justice. A society based on affirmative mutual consent and a system orthogonal to power to handle disputes.

Unfortunately, power determining the outcome of disputes is the default, and a system of law or justice cannot enforce itself without the participation of those bound by it. The core founding principle of western society is solidarity via collective bargaining, what other option is there than other than to submit to someone more powerful than any individual?

Do you want to submit to a man, or submit to an idea? If you submit to an idea you must defend it. If you submit to a man, you deny your own agency and your own rights.

> The core founding principle of western society is solidarity via collective bargaining

What is the basis of that assertion? If you go back as far as the Greeks, this only holds true if you focus on one specific city-state, and ignore that said city-state disenfranchised foreigners and legally permitted the ownership of slaves. Similar problems occur if we attribute western civilization to the Romans.

I am far from a historian, but my understanding is that the protestant reformation birthed the enlightenment by shifting people's idea of god as something to be interpreted by an authority structure (the church) to something that is interpreted internally. Is your relationship with god mediated by a church or a direct relationship with god? The reformation is more closely related to "westenrism" than the Greeks or Romans who laid some of the philosophical groundwork.

Out of the enlightenment we get John Locke who provided much of America's founding philosophy:

Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.

My claim is that this is isomorphic to solidarity via collective bargaining when you account for the idea that the government being an impartial judge is not black and white but grey.

I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.

It is not collective bargaining. You refer to the social contract.

The idea of the social contract has issues. For one, the fundamental of contract is consent, which is missing.

Realism tells us that we do not delegate anything to the state.

> The reformation is more closely related to "westenrism" than the Greeks or Romans who laid some of the philosophical groundwork.

I can see where you're getting this, but I would disagree. Western civilization is inseparable from the Greeks and Romans. What you are describing sounds more like a particular development that occurred in Northern Europe which resulted in a radical re-engineering of social structures, ultimately culminating in parliamentary democracy. I don't know enough of the history well enough to determine whether this happened because of the reformation, a scientific revolution, economic changes, or whatever other reason we could come up with, but I do understand the trend that you're talking about. Today we would broadly associate it with Anglo-American liberal democracy. The issue I took with your comment was that I don't think there's a compelling case to be made that "the West" is predicated on these values, since historically speaking they are comparatively new.

There is some scholarship that tries to make this argument (e.g. I can remember reading an article many years ago which tried to argue that western civilization originates in the Near East after the adoption of massed-infantry by the Hittites), but the more of it that I read, the more convinced I became that it was simply an attempt to view history through the lens of contemporary attitudes (e.g. of Anglo-American liberal democracy being the culmination of all historical development).

> I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.

I don't have a strong opinion on this one way or the other, but you may be interested to know that there is a considerable tradition which rejects this conclusion in the reactionaries. Some element of the tradition rejects the premise of human rights entirely, but others are rooted in a far more critical reading of power and how it (ostensibly) must operate. Most people who have read into these issues will be familiar with the reactionaries who reject human rights as a principle, but very few are even aware of the sort who reject the prescriptions of the sort of governance you are describing while (at least nominally) sharing its aims re: justice and freedom.