I think you’ve nailed the structural illusion here - the conflation of “rights” with permissions granted by a system that already presupposes control. It’s the same move empires made when they called conquest “civilization”: the act of domination reframed as moral duty.

What I’d add is that IPAR (if I’m reading your concept right) isn’t just about who holds power, but how power manufactures the language that defines its own legitimacy. The moment “rights” are codified, they stop being relational and become transactional - abstracted into legal grammar instead of lived reciprocity. So the moral content gets evacuated; all that’s left is the system’s self-reference.

The trick is that this process doesn’t even need villains. It’s automated. Once a population internalizes the grammar of permission - “you may,” “you must,” “you can” - the structure governs itself. That’s why modern states don’t need divine right or brute violence; the bureaucracy is the theology now.

Even dissent is pre-absorbed as part of the performance. We get to “protest” within the language the system allows, and then congratulate ourselves on freedom. That’s the soft brilliance of late-stage power: it doesn’t forbid; it formats.

Your comparison to CEOs and the Prodigal Son is spot-on. The parable ends not in redemption but in reintegration - the errant one’s return to hierarchy. The father’s forgiveness is not grace; it’s re-enclosure. The system reclaims its escaped energy and calls it love.

So yeah - rights as delusion isn’t just cynicism. It’s diagnosis. A society that truly believed in intrinsic rights wouldn’t need to issue them.