Page 19 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV

It burdens yet more when members, born free, cede their rights only to have them trampled by irrationality’s chance, obfuscating the line between liberty and oppression. Nothing is worst to a citizen than once having known himself to be free, and a possessor of inalienable rights, he has cruelly, and unjustly lost them.58 Such are the terrifying burdens when High Courts, Divine or earthly, are tempted by absolute power. They exercise the very despotism shown in Job’s and Joseph K’s trials,59 in Milton’s England under King Charles I despotic reign, and in Nazi Germany. Subjugated to the tyranny of the majority, “apparently suspect” citizens were neither forced to be free,60 nor regained their natural original liberties to judge for themselves61 in the spirit of self-preservation. Instead, “apparently guilty” citizens, once having lost their rights and liberties, were not only constrained, but also reduced to terror, and to a wretched impotence in being persecuted, hunted and executed like beasts. In this state of affairs, all boundaries between a Sovereign and a Master of Death are blurry.
In a complex humanism and culture whose despotism eternally returns, everything descends to an ancient chasm, where a word is enough for anyone to distort the right and raise anyone to kill or hunt beneath some astute phrase by promise spread. A mighty might as right, freezes not only Job and Joseph K, but also hurls the world to
58 In a Suzerain Covenant, a member knows he has lost all his rights by force, and out of necessity. See page 2 paragraph 2.
59 Both Job, in the Book of Job and Joseph K, in Kafka’s The Trial, are persecuted unjustly by inaccessible High Courts, one divine (Job), the other earthly (K). Both Job and Joseph K are innocent; yet undergo trials where they are unaware and ignore their charges. Both are hunted like beasts; both revolt against injustice, oppression and power; both yearn for justice and vindication. In the end Job is restored; and Joseph K murdered. The Bible. The Book of Job. The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Augmented Third Edition. Ed. By Michael D. Coogan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. by Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.
60 Ibid., Book I. Chapter 7. 61 Ibid., Book I. Chapter 6.
—19—