Do we have the right to dignity?

Thanks @Martin P. Zuzak for the question.

Nope, nobody can give you dignity but yourself. A prince is still a prince even at the bottom of the junkyard pit. You have the right to respect, but dignity is something only you can destroy or affirm.

Now, there is the formal social “dignity” coming from laws and conventions. This is as empty a container, pretending to substitute form for essence, as religion is an empty container to spirituality when the practice is misaligned and misleading. It’s just a shield for power, a mask for the public persona, and a performance tool in the social apparatus game. Though a container can be in harmony with its content by serving the content’s purpose, it gets some grace and harmony.

A civic form can be dignified by its utility in helping the deeper values that it conveys.

Steve Jobs made Macintosh computers beautiful inside and outside too, powered on or off.

Form served the essence

The same goes for richness: one is as rich as his needs are not. The richest one has no desires, while the poor can be a beggar in golden clothes.

Last but not least: when your government supports genocide, you cannot claim to have any systemic dignity whatsoever. So in this sense, I have the right to dignity as a self-dignified human being, and it is the government’s role to act morally in order to fulfill its obligation as a formal leader of human beings.

Just as an individual can be, the government as a collective entity can be self-dignified or undignified. As an individual, the loss of dignity is what we call wrong, while preserving it is what you can call good.

Dignity is respecting and perceiving the self-worth of one’s humanity, which has intrinsic value by itself. Any individual has access to this value etalon by intentionally practicing being human with courage, faith, and will: loving, suffering, seeking justice, seeking harmony, seeking wholeness, and unmediated beauty. One should use these virtues to discover and mould himself to the highest godliness standard he can reach.

Climbing the moral ladder is like a climber ascending: using hands, crampons, and ropes to reach the highest peak of the mountain and of their own ambition.

Thus, the source of value is always universal, and humans are built to see, to hear, to touch, and to feel it. Call it God if you want. From this relationship, humans know what is good and what is wrong.

Destroying one’s harmony, wholeness, authenticity, freedom, or what you could call “god-like” attributes is the loss of dignity, for dignity is preserving the “god-like” essence of one’s being.