Bonus Sample: Simone Weil: We Have Obligations Before We Have Rights
Matthew Remsky dives into Simone Weil’s radical philosophy, emphasizing their argument that obligations precede rights—rights only matter when others fulfill duties toward us. Weil’s posthumous The Need for Roots (Gallimard, 1949) crystallizes this in its first chapter, The Needs of the Soul, where they claim rights depend on collective recognition of shared responsibilities, critiquing liberal democracies’ hypocrisy. Their prolific output—2 million words across 16 volumes—reveals a mind resistant to linear clarity, yet this idea reshapes how we view justice and systemic accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello everyone, this is Conspirituality where we investigate the intersections and roots of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
My name is Matthew Remsky.
You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on Blue Sky.
The podcast is on Instagram and threads under the handle at ConspiritualityPod.
And you can also find me on YouTube and TikTok as anti-fascist dad.
Very, very short bonus episode today.
I want to outline a single idea from the work of Simone Vey, who you might remember I spoke about in some detail a few months back with reference to their anti-fascist life and how I believe it was enriched and challenged by their lived experience of autism.
I also believe that Vey was non-binary, which is why I'm using they then.
Now, the one idea that I want to look at today is that Vey says we as human beings have obligations before we have rights, and that it is only our obligations that make rights truly attainable.
Obligations, Vey argues, come from the nature of our existence, and they allow us to grant rights to each other.
As per Vey's autism, this argument, I believe, is deeply informed by the common intolerance of hypocrisy reported by many autistic people.
Because they're basically saying to all liberal democracies, all of your talk about individual rights is undermined by your neglect of obligations to each other.
Now, I'm making this short because I believe it's a singular and powerful idea to present as cleanly as possible, and then I just want to let it hang there for you to think about.
Now, the clarity part for a little audio essay is a challenge because Vey was an extremely creative, episodic, and parallel processing type of thinker who never boiled down their thoughts into book form and only rarely did essays.
Now, I argued in that series that Vay presented a common skills and talent challenge of some autistic people, which is the tendency to favor info-dumping over concision.
And in those previous episodes, I argued that they were also hypergraphic.
I noted that their complete works have been put out by 16 volumes by Gallimard.
And, you know, I don't have a total page count on that collection.
But if the average is 500 pages per volume at 250 pages per book, or 250 words per page, rather, that's 2 million published words.
Very few of them published before Vey's death at the age of 34.
Now, let's say that the journals begin at 20, and so, you know, 2 million words get written over 14 years.
That's 140,000 words per year, or about 400 per day.
And of course, they came in fits and starts.
She would go periods for not writing, and then she'd be up all night writing.
But I believe that, you know, hypergraphia is at least part of what she's dealing with on a daily basis.
So I have to ask Vay's ghost for forgiveness as I try to distill out this gem, which likely runs in hints and shadows throughout their archive.
I mean, I can't be sure, but I'm just going to make that assumption.
But scholars seem to agree that their most cogent presentation of this idea is in a posthumous book that Vey began conceiving late in their young life, a book that was eventually called The Need for Roots.
Here's the opening paragraph from the first chapter of that book, and that chapter is called The Needs of the Soul.
Quote: The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former.
A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.
The effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him.
The Needs of the Soul00:00:26
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