The Temporal Rights theory of natural rights brings Western and Eastern thoughts together and proves that each one is correct but incomplete.

Western Thought

The basic context of Western thought is that the world consists of many different things that can be manipulated to maximize our “creature comforts”. This inevitably leads to materialism, where profits are a validation of worthiness. It has permitted a selfishness that ignores the value of relationships and invites the abuse of freedom for the pleasures of license.

When this materialism is unfettered by the death of accountability, there are no moral guardrails, so when truth gets in the way of one’s accumulation of worldly glory, it is simply replaced with what seems more convenient. The value of honor and integrity have died across huge swaths of populations.

This behavior was inevitable. These people are not crazy; they are just hell bent on the accumulation of worldly glory: fame, fortune, and power, especially political power, where the force of law can be harnessed, and the wealth of nations pillaged with impunity.

We have been fooled by our Western thought that the world is made up of separated objects to be arranged to our personal benefit. This deep analytical perspective has delivered life to science but death to relationships. We tend to value relationships only when that attention is required to manipulate people and things.

The fruits of Western thought have long since matured and now rot in turbulent pools of anger, frustration, and violence.

Eastern Thought

Meanwhile the Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian have seen the world as one complex entity where relationships are paramount. These philosophies have their own set of problems because they prioritize group harmony (an abstraction) over the individual (an existential reality). This kind of “group think” has lead to minimizing the value of individual rights and suppressing dissent.

The group harmony, group welfare mentality, natural to Eastern thought, has inevitably led to collectivist governments of monarchies and dynasties. These governments tend to be oppressive because dissent is seen first as a disruption of harmony. Individual property rights have suffered so that the motivations native to free enterprise were ineffective, and poverty has taken its toll. If the individual devalues his own enterprise, he does not invest in such.

The fruits of Eastern thought have long since matured and now rot in putrid pools of filth, poverty, and despair.

Temporal Rights Demand Simultaneity

The simplistic views of both Eastern and Western thought have historically delivered what was needed for a time, but being incomplete, each one has ripened into a perspective wholly inadequate to sustainable governments.

The Temporal Rights perspective on life reveals that the individual operator (Western) and its group domain (Eastern) intrinsically exist at the same level; and that they must be tended simultaneously with a balanced, holistic mindset.

Both the operator and its domain exist at the same, primal level. The domain is crowded with other operators whose domains overlap, and relationships become a matter of vital interest. Each person functions in an environment where a crowd of other persons is constantly interacting. This puts the individuality of the citizen and his relationships to other citizens on the same plane, and that, in turn, demands that both individual rights and relationships must be simultaneously addressed.

My fellow citizens must restrain themselves from violating my rights so my freedom is assured, and I must do the same for them. This is the nut of the Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” for indeed they are, each with his rights and each in the common domain of life where our operations transpire. This was not a statement that people were created with equal capabilities, but the observation that we all operate in identical domains, or rather, that we exercise our rights in the same domain.

To see this from another, practical angle: Temporal Rights demands protection of both the individual operator and the relational environment in which it operates, because they cannot be separated. Natural rights can be no more effective than their sphere of dominion permits.

Unification Brings Peace

Understanding Temporal Rights and valuing that understanding will bring peace to the individual because he will naturally tend to balance his attention to individual freedom and to the relationships he has with all his neighbors. Citizens who are at peace with themselves have little need to look to others or their government for solutions to their troubled minds, but are content with their situation.

It will bring peace between nations whose citizens have a common understanding of the true nature of nature and their place in it.