It'll depend on what is meant by 'rights', but you've claimed that losing a right = suffering, and I'm going to claim that what you think "rights" are is based in the standard story that created the United States. The social contract tradition (beginning with Hobbes, up through Thomas Paine and the framers of the US constitution) is based on the idea that each individual has what we could call "natural right(s)", which amount to something like the right to use whatever means one can to get whatever one wants. The problem is that this on its own would result in pure anarchy, in which the most powerful individuals would take whatever they want from others by force. But Hobbes was the first to notice that this seems to lend itself, by reason, to the "prisoner's dilemma" (a standard game-theory metaphor). Since we have the ability to plan ahead for the future, it turns out that natural right ends up tempering itself with cooperation fairly quickly. But *mere* cooperation is a problem, since without some means to make sure that all parties really do cooperate, it will always be more rational for one party to promise to cooperate, get what they want from the other, and then "defect" (i.e., renege on the promise). That is why we have legal contracts which require third-party enforcement by a party that is more powerful than either of the two members. But this is CLEARLY a giving up of one's right (to use one's own individual power to get what one wants). So it follows that existing in a society at all involves giving up one's natural right (i.e. "power") to the sovereign (i.e., the state) so that things are more stable. For Liberals who came along after Hobbes, like Locke and Mill and Rousseau, the question was always: how much of that natural right/liberty do we need to give up to ensure the optimal level of stability and beneficence in a society? (For Locke and Mill it was generally: as little as possible.)LJF wrote:Why, help me understand how I've said that. I don't think that at all.Adurentibus Spina wrote:LJF, by your reasoning, you suffer by being in a society in the first place.
The problem is that you've construed giving up rights itself as suffering, and so no matter what society you are in, you will be suffering to some degree. But this can't be right, because in fact, without society, you would be suffering far more (unless by luck you happened to be the most powerful single individual person, and were also able to stave off the collective forces of every other individual together, but this is probably impossible.)
So it simply isn't true that losing a right = suffering.