Natural Rights Were Just Good Protocol Design
Locke’s big idea was that some rights are natural — they don’t come from the king, the government, any authority. They exist prior to all of it, by virtue of what you are. Life, liberty, property: yours not because someone granted them but because no legitimate authority could grant or revoke them in the first place. Government’s only job is to protect rights that already exist, not issue them. Take the granting authority away and the rights remain.
Wild claim in a world of kings, and I think it’s the cleanest spec ever written for what we now call trustlessness.
Here’s the parallel that won’t leave me alone. The old model of rights was permissioned: you have what the sovereign lets you have, and what the sovereign grants the sovereign can revoke. Your property is yours until the king decides it isn’t. Your liberty is yours at the pleasure of the crown. Everything routes through a central authority that can reach in and change the state of your life by decree. Permissioned system. The authority is a single point of failure and a single point of tyranny, same point.
Locke’s natural rights try to design that single point of failure out. The whole move: make certain things true by the structure of reality itself, not by the ongoing permission of an authority that could change its mind. Your rights shouldn’t depend on a benevolent king staying benevolent. They should hold regardless of who’s in charge, because depending on a benevolent authority means you’re one bad authority away from losing everything. Sound familiar. It’s the exact argument for why you’d want value and ownership to live in a protocol whose rules hold regardless of who’s running the company this quarter.
I came up through a world obsessed with removing trusted intermediaries — making ownership a fact of the system instead of a permission granted by a custodian who could freeze, seize, or reverse it. And every time I think hard about why that matters, I land back on Locke. The point was never the technology. It’s the same point Locke made in 1689: rights you hold by permission are rights you don’t really hold. The custodian who can grant can revoke. The only ownership worth the name holds even when the authority turns hostile or just disappears.
The deist frame sharpens it. The deist God doesn’t intervene — He sets up laws that run on their own and steps back. A good rights-system has the same shape: rules baked into the structure, holding by themselves, no benevolent operator reaching in to enforce the right answer. The interventionist God and the interventionist sovereign share a flaw — both make the good outcome contingent on the continued good behavior of a central actor. Locke and the deists were both, in their domains, trying to design that contingency away.
This isn’t only crypto, though. It’s a way to size up any arrangement you’re in. Ask: does this thing I have hold by structure, or by someone’s ongoing permission. Your equity, your access, your standing — granted or natural. Permissioned things get revoked the moment the grantor’s interests change, usually right when you need them most. The Lockean question is whether your position rests on a right that holds by structure or a privilege that holds by someone’s mood.
Natural rights were good protocol design three centuries early. Hold what holds by structure. Everything granted can be revoked.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.