What if the founders were wrong about this? What if "these truths" are not "self evident" to all men?
As I've gotten older, I've come to the realization that many ideas, ways of thinking, that I grew up believing were shared by everyone, are anything but universal. I don't mean "belief in G-d" here. I mean things like a belief in truth. In the concept of truth. In the concept of reality. In the concept of causality, that if you do "X," that "Y" must necessarily follow. And it's corollary; that if "Y" happens to you, it is probably because you did "X" last month, or yesterday, or three seconds ago.
These ideas are held by many in America and around the world, but the number of people who do not hold them is shockingly large, and seems to be growing.
I disagree with Ayn Rand on some fundamental aspects of her philosophy, but she was right about this one when she wrote "man is the only creature that has to make a conscious choice, every day, whether or not to be human."
It is of no importance whether any one particular person or group of persons believe the "truths" to be "self evident". The Declaration states "WE hold these truths ..." (emphasis on WE).
In other words - the signatories to the Delcaration were stating quite clearly that THEY believed that the truths were unable to be contradicted and thus, for them, something worth fighting for!
Most people forget what the Declaration really was - it was the justification of the signatories as to WHY they sought independence from England - in hopes that other nations (mostly France) would come to thier aid.
I think the founders expected some would disagree that all men are created equal, and so forth. The "We hold" part of "We hold these points to be self-evident" is simply an assertion of the rock bottom they were going to build the rest of their statement upon. In other words, they weren't going to argue whether or not all men are created equal, have the right to life and liberty. They ASSERTED it as their belief, claimed "self evident", with no philosophical argument or support, and proceeded to announce they were rejecting the authority of the government that was in power, and that they would fight to sustain that rejection, and establish a new government that suited their principles.
I have often thought the same thing. It doesn’t seem to me that some truths are “self evident”. It seems to me that most people are utter morons who have no idea about anything.
So, going on about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” being self evident is one large question mark tending toward the negative.
I tend to go more with Burke: poor, nasty, brutish and short.
The self-evident truths line is rhetorical and proves nothing. It is a statement of the premises upon which the rest of the document rests, but they certainly can be disagreed with. At the time, the Enlightenment was in full swing and so a line like that could probably stand on its own, but in the last 200 years the notion of natural law and a rational basis for everything has taken a real beating.
That’s really the root of our problems, why we’re drifting away from the Constitution and our founding ideas: a lot of people are skeptical of them. Many people would agree with the UN Declaration on Human Rights as a better basis for establishing rights than the Declaration of Independence. It’s the whole positive versus negative rights thing. The former rejects natural law and the notion of self-evident unalienable rights established in nature or a Creator (i.e. outside of human will). FDR sealed the deal in 1944 with his New Bill of Rights which was a flat out rejection of the Declaration’s understanding of rights.
But that’s the nature of things. Words on a page and the ideas they express can’t last forever. There’s a kind of entropy that changes things, and ideas are delicate things. In order to maintain them, you almost have to build a cult around them, as the religions do. You have to develop ritual and dogma and have a committed priestly caste to maintain them and make sure they are passed on to the next generation intact. We have been too casual about maintaining our founding ideas for this to happen. However, given the natural flux of human understanding, I actually think our ideas have persisted remarkably well. What they have going for them in my opinion is that they are true, and therefore they tend to work, but even that’s not really enough.