The Ikea Bill of Rights - Granite Grok

The Ikea Bill of Rights

I recently read about a psychological phenomenon called ‘the Ikea effect’.  Briefly, if you make something — or even just finish making what someone else has started — you value it more than if it’s already complete when you get it.  The work you put in gives you a sense of ownership.

When I saw that, it occurred to me that people don’t seem to value our Constitution, and in particular, our Bill of Rights, as much as they probably should.  And now I wonder if that’s not at least partly because these were handed to them, already complete.

And if that’s true, what might we do about it? 

There’s a game that you can play with any group of people.  It’s basically a what-if game, which starts with this premise:  Someone is in power, and the vast majority of people want to get him out of power.  (Think of your favorite warlord or dictator.)

In Round One, you start thinking of things that he might do to suppress their ability to accomplish that goal.

A few are no-brainers.  He wouldn’t want anyone who isn’t loyal to him to have weapons.  He’d want to limit, and probably censor, the ideas that are published, and if possible, the ideas that are transmitted in letters and phone conversations and social media posts.

Since religion can be a hotbed of resistance, he might want to suppress any religions that aren’t friendly to his regime.

Some are more subtle.  For example, if he catches someone trying to undermine his regime, he might choose to have them punished in some spectacular fashion, to set an example for everyone else.  Or he might just lock them away, without a trial.

Since people who want to remove him would clearly want to hide that fact, he’d want to be able to search them, and their houses, and their property, on the merest suspicion that such a search might turn up something subversive.

And so on.

In Round Two, you use the list generated during Round One to write a document that prohibits the government from doing any of those things:  It can’t disarm people, or restrict what they say, or lock them up without a trial, or search their property without evidence of some crime, and so on.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds, because again, there are subtleties.  For example, there might actually be circumstances under which it’s necessary and proper to search someone’s property, or to keep him from saying something, to prevent him from carrying certain kinds of weapons in certain kinds of places, and so on.

At the end of Round Two, what you have is… a Bill of Rights.  Not the Bill of Rights, but something that should be similar in spirit, and have considerable overlap.

I recommend that if you’ve never done this, you give it a try — with children, if possible — and compare what you come up with against the first ten amendments to the Constitution.  (To help set the mood, you might try it on the Fourth of July, or on Bill of Rights Day, December 15.)

You may include some new things — for example, pertaining to electronic surveillance — that no one would have dreamed of in the 18th century.  You may exclude some things — for example, you might not worry too much about quartering soldiers in private homes.  You might see a need for qualifications where none were included — for example, some reasons for restricting speech, or the keeping and bearing of arms.

But just doing the exercise should give you a new appreciation for, and a deeper understanding of, just what goes into crafting a document as remarkable, and as essential to freedom, as our Bill of Rights.

And if it accomplishes nothing else, getting people to play this game might lead them to ponder an important point about our electoral system that appears to have been mostly lost on voters — that point of elections isn’t to get the right people into office.  For the most part, what 230 years of elections should have taught us is that, with a few exceptions, there are no ‘right people’.

The beauty — and the point — of elections is that when an elected official proves to be especially bad, they give us a way to get him back out of office, without having to resort to violence.

Whenever a new President is inaugurated, we’re sure to hear pundits speak in awed tones about the ‘peaceful transfer of power’, and how great that is.  And it is great.   But what makes it possible is that a lot of the non-peaceful alternatives were short-circuited by strong prohibitions on the power of the government chartered by the Constitution.

And that makes each election — like the one we’re about to hold — a great opportunity to think long and hard about the prospect of weakening any of those prohibitions, even a little bit.

>