The Two Great Sins Of Sovereignty

One is to take from others their sovereignty and responsibility. The other is to give away your own.

Every being has to carry their own sovereignty and their own right relationship to one and all. There are two ways to fail at it, and they are mirror images.

Taking. Deciding for someone, managing them for their own good, arranging their life so that no choice is required of them, rescuing them from every consequence. It presents as care and as competence, and it is usually done by the more capable person to the less. What it removes is not only agency but the responsibility that agency carries — which is the part that would have grown them (Manufactured Dependency, Centralization Of Power, Sovereignty).

Giving away. Handing one's own decisions to a leader, an institution, a doctrine, a partner, a crowd — anyone who will carry the weight of choosing. It presents as humility, as loyalty, or as trust, and it is usually done by the one who is tired (Sovereignty Of Consciousness, Consent, Aligned Will).

The pairing is the instrument. Most bodies guard one and not the other, and each has a characteristic blindness. A body vigilant against domination will not notice its members quietly abdicating; a body that prizes loyalty will not notice its leaders quietly accumulating. Both failures produce the same result from different directions — decisions made by someone other than the person who has to live with them — and the two are complementary rather than opposed. Every abdication finds a taker; every taker needs someone who abdicated.

What the pair rules out is the comfortable middle position: that one is merely being helpful, or merely being agreeable. The test is the same on both sides — whose responsibility is this, and who is actually carrying it? (Accountability, Delegation, Agency, not ownership, Subsidiarity.)

These are the clearest statement in the corpus of how sovereignty is actually lost, and the reason so much of the canon's structure exists: consent at the door, the freedom to leave, decisions held at the smallest competent scale, and authority that can be recalled (Primacy Of Consent, Subsidiarity Of Authority, The Way Out).

Also called: the two sins · taking and giving away Stands on: Sovereignty · Sovereignty Of Consciousness · Accountability · Consent Opens onto: Manufactured Dependency · Centralization Of Power · Subsidiarity · Delegation · Agency, not ownership · Servant Leadership · The Way Out · Dignity In play: the table — asked of any decision one person is about to make for another Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/The LIØNSBERG Book of Meditations/Meditation 50 (unmarked; listed in the canon's audit as material to card, never carded) · lionsberg.wiki: The LIØNSBERG Book of Meditations Open: Two sentences of canon. Nothing addresses the cases where taking responsibility for another is right — the child, the unconscious, the person in crisis — which the canon elsewhere insists on. The line between care and the first sin is not drawn anywhere.