Mark Pellegrino’s thoughts on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I think the declaration is fine when it’s dealing with rights, up until about article 22. And then it starts listing entitlements as rights. So clearly the people who who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were influenced by Roosevelt’s second bill of rights, which is all about entitlement fulfilment. All about the obligations of some people to supply others with what they need. It comes from a place of awareness of the fact that we live in an abundant universe now, that capitalism and freedom and science has made abundance in the universe. It just doesn’t know how to distribute it or how to organize society in such a way as to make that progress a permanent thing. And the reason is because they don’t know what rights are. Rights are not privileges or entitlements that the state doles out based on you being human. Rights are a condition for rational action that the government provides by security, right, by protecting you from violence. So rights are a zone in which no other person can trespass. They’re not they’re not a permission to trespass, they’re the opposite. They’re a stop sign to trespass.

Will Mark tell us anything about his character on Class of ’09?