The Consumer vs. the Citizen, part 3

In parts 1 & 2 of this meditation, I’ve shown how our over-the-top consumerism makes us hog the world’s natural resources and invade nations so we can continue the hogging, and how our hoggishness corrupts our political, economic and legal culture.

Now let’s consider Thomas Jefferson’s definitions of citizenship and freedom. Volumes have been written about these subjects, yet by focusing on the Declaration of Independence we can understand what his views were.

Very recently, scholars discovered that when Jefferson began drafting the Declaration he used the word “subjects” to describe the people, like him, who lived in England’s North American colonies. This word is of ancient usage, because it describes the position of an unprivileged person in a monarchical system of government; according to established law, the person is “subject” the decrees of a king. Given that Jefferson’s task was to explain why the colonists were not obliged to obey the king’s laws, he “sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it.” In its place, he wrote “citizen”:

“No longer subjects to the crown, the colonists became something different: a people whose allegiance was to one another, not to a faraway monarch.”

Jefferson explained that this new-and-improved approach to governance required people—citizens—to create and institute laws by consent, through a process of open debate and collective decision-making. Moreover, and of profound import, these laws would be instituted to protect the natural rights of all human beings:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Jefferson foresaw that even governance-by-consent would, over time, tend to invest a minority with great powers over the majority, and that—if they were not vigilant in protecting their natural rights—citizens would find themselves being turned into subjects. For this reason, he said that citizens had the right to re-establish their rights by overthrowing oppressive governments:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Jefferson believed that citizens must be creative and active. The citizen had a character, a kind of identity, that was key to governance-by-consent: ie., democracy.

Already we can see that this quality of character contrasts with that of the consumer, who is served, and pays someone else to be creative and active for them. To put it bluntly, Jefferson would not/did not approve of “couch potatoes”—because they made fine subjects.

Tomorrow: Jefferson’s definition of freedom.

Related posts:

1. The Consumer vs. the Citizen, part 2
2. The Consumer vs. the Citizen, conclusion
3. The Consumer vs. the Citizen, part 1
4. nature is that which gives birth
5. if you are “sacred” then… (pt2)