# The Universal Node

> Individual rights are a protocol, not a favour.

- Published: 2026-10-23
- Reading time: 1 min
- Source: original
- Canonical: https://reverb256.ca/posts/the-universal-node/
- Markdown: https://reverb256.ca/posts/the-universal-node.md

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When a certain kind of collectivist hears "individual rights," they hear "my house, my rules, and the rest of you can freeze." It is a neat trick: take a sentence that was always meant for everyone and pretend it was a demand for special treatment. From there the conclusion writes itself. Individual rights are selfish, and only the group can be trusted to see the big problems.

The trick only works if you have never had to administer a network.

"Individual rights" is not a claim about me. It is a protocol: one rule, the same rule, applied to every participant, or it is not a right at all but a favour that can be withdrawn. A favour is a thing you keep until someone stronger changes their mind. A rule that bends for the person I dislike will bend for me next, and then the only thing left standing is whoever holds the pen.

That is what the selfishness argument keeps missing. A right that covers only people I approve of is not a right; it is a membership perk. Putting the individual first is arithmetical: no central authority gets to decide whose case is exceptional. I cannot keep a network healthy by degrading the machines it is made of, and every server you crush to "protect" the system is one less machine that can speak. The system is nothing but its machines.

So yes, I am asking for something for myself. I am asking for exactly the same thing for you, and for the person we both dislike, and for the one after that. That is not selfishness. It is the only arrangement in which nobody has to ask permission to exist.

Related: [The Airgapped Mind](/posts/airgapped-mind/) · [The Sysadmin Protocol](/posts/the-sysadmin-protocol/) · [The Armed Super-Monopoly](/posts/the-armed-super-monopoly/) · [Collectivism as a Secular Theology](/posts/collectivism-as-secular-theology/)

Further reading: [Build Canada](https://www.buildcanada.com/about), people as individuals with agency.