Glenn Beck

Why do individuals matter?

The founders gave the answer, and you don't have to agree with it, but it shaped everything that followed.

They argued that your rights don't come from a king or parliament or a president or a majority or a corporation or a machine.

They're inherent, and they belong to you because you're a human.

That's what they meant by being endowed by your creator with certain inalienable rights.

The source matters because anything granted by power can be revoked by power, any and everything.

If the worth comes from the state, the state can redefine it.

If your worth comes from public opinion, public opinion can withdraw it.

If your worth comes from economic usefulness, a machine may eventually outperform you.

But if human dignity exists independent of those things, then none of those things get the vote.

Not the government, not the market, not the algorithm, not the crowd, none of it.

That's the well.

The belief that every person possesses value that cannot be measured by productivity, popularity, wealth, or utility.

And wells matter because civilizations get thirsty and we are really, really thirsty

Sooner or later, every generation reaches a point where fear runs ahead of confidence, where problems look bigger than the solution, where decline seems inevitable, where people become convinced history has finally arrived at the chapter where everything falls apart and we're all doomed.

And that's where you find out whether there's any water left in that well, and there is plenty of it.

Same well previous generations have had water from.

Same one sustained people facing wars and depressions and revolutions and the Nazis and the crisis they were certain are going to destroy them.

The future is not a weather report.

It's not.