Don't Confuse Duty With Honor

There are those who seem to think that it is obligatory to feel a sense of duty as part of a sense of nationalism.  They cannot escape a need in themselves to feel compelled to serve out some role as part of their gratitude for living in a society that gives them their rights.

Of course they're wrong. Not that duty as a concept is wrong, but that people should feel obligated to serve as required to some overblown idea that the political boundaries one lives within automatically and inherently commits one to servitude to the government of that society within.

These are quite often people who have become convinced of the idea that there is some "greater good" in society and that placing a majority of numbers of people above individuals is somehow morally right.   Historically speaking,  that usually ends up in genocide but hey, whats a little tyranny and mass murder as long as the people doing it felt morally superior, right?

Here's where populists and socialists get libertarian principles wrong, usually on purpose. Populists and socialists think that numbers and mobs rule.  That 10 is greater and more valuable than 1 or even 3.  They use simplistic math and reduce a person's value to one of many.

The libertarian way of seeing it is that any and every individual can be exponentially valuable entirely on their own.  They also don't believe that grouping individuals (voluntarily, of course) is as simple as 1+1=2.  No, we believe that in incredible ways, putting individuals together can add up to much more than the sum of their parts.  1+1 can indeed equal 3 or maybe 5, or 2.  You get the idea.

The value of any individual is not and cannot be simply reduced to one of many and that by preserving many and sacrificing the individual or the minority is in any way morally superior to herd preservation.  

A sense of duty and obligation to any collective that does not value the individual  or minority is misguided at best and suicidal at worst.  This is what individuals like Thomas Jefferson understood that many seem not to fathom.  It is our sense of duty to hold ourselves to principles and ideals which hold individuals with their inherent individual responsibilities and rights that prevents mob tyranny and holds socialist/populist dominance at bay.

If we must be honorbound and be obliged to duty, that duty is to uphold and defend not the Constitution but the principles which brought the Constitution to be made and a nation formed that were described in the Declaration of Independence.