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Title: Non-Competitive Society Author: Miloslav Číž Date: August 25 2019 Language: en Topics: society, competition, capitalism, socialism, communism, non-violence, free software, FOSS, open source, free culture, collaboration, technology, universal basic income, pacifism, democracy, veganism, idealism, leftism, rightism, equality Source: Retrieved on August 28 2019 from https://gitlab.com/drummyfish/my_writings/blob/master/non-competitive%20society.md
by Miloslav Číž (drummyfish)
version 0.13, August 28 2019
Released under CC0 1.0, public domain (
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
).
Available at
https://gitlab.com/drummyfish/my_writings/blob/master/non-competitive%20society.md
.
keywords: society, competition, anarchism, capitalism, socialism,
communism, non-violence, free software, FOSS, open source, free culture,
collaboration, technology, universal basic income, pacifism, democracy,
veganism, idealism, leftism, rightism, equality
I think it may be important for the text to come with a little bit of
meta information, for the context to be clear. Let me write it here.
This has been written solely by a single person – me, drummyfish. It
reflects my personal opinions, ideas and life philosophy so far,
regarding politics but also technology and society in wide. Life
philosophy is what I would prefer to call this.
The text is written in plural, as if by a collective of authors who all
hold my opinions and so maybe belong to a movement, but keep in mind it
is so far only me. I have simply found it comfortable to write this way,
perhaps because I like to imagine my ideas adopted by more people.
My education is in the area of technology, not history or politics. I am
also not a native English speaker and this is the first text of this
kind I have ever written. So much has to be said in order for potential
errors to be explained.
I haven't written this for any specific purpose – I am not intending to
start a movement, even though I wouldn't oppose its formation either. I
simply found that writing helped me explore and analyze ideas, and that
it helped me personally in various other ways. Another reason for
writing this has been simply a desire to share ideas. A practical use of
this work that I imagined was to serve me as something I could refer
people to when I am having discussion with them, as I have lately found
often repeating myself and reformulating my arguments over and over
again – now I can simply point to paragraphs of this text.
If anyone finds this work useful in any way, I will be glad if you use
it. You can share it, sell it, edit it, build upon it and so on. You can
do absolutely anything with it, that is why I share it as public domain
under the CC0 waiver, in the spirit of the ideas I am about to present.
I believe that what you do with this text is your responsibility, not
mine.
This document is not connected to or endorsed by any existing
organization or movement and it has not been sponsored by anyone.
This document outlines a model of a possible ideal human society and a
subsequent life philosophy, which if adopted by many people would lead
to largely implementing it.
But isn't this just communism? No – although being a far left idea
(definition of which will follow further) and sharing many ideas with
communism and similar movements, this is an approach new in many ways,
different by being non-violent, peaceful, evolutionary, opposing
rightism as well as leftist populism and false (pseudo) leftism (such as
feminism, LGBT and Antifa), and revised based on recent history,
observations of the late stage of capitalism, the state of modern
technology and so on.
Our theory mainly merges existing ideas, old and modern (e.g. anarchism,
non-violence, free culture, distributed systems), into a greater whole
and tries to show and prove the result is consistent and valid. As it's
been hinted, we aim to very slowly start replacing competition – the
main but outdated drive behind the current society – with collaboration.
We provide all the reasoning for why it is important and how we want to
do it without violence and with as little harm as possible (considering
no change can be achieved with zero harm).
What concerns us about modern society is not that it has flaws or that
it is still far away from our ideal, but that instead of trying to get
closer to the ideal we are heading in a completely opposite direction by
supporting and strengthening capitalism, business, nationalism,
competition and so on. What we want to achieve is not, unlike with
communism, a revolution and putting in place a new world order, but just
steering the direction of society in the right way.
Unlike many groups using an idea simply as a weapon or a tool to gaining
power in competition with other groups, we are primarily looking for the
truth. Our goal is not power or defeat of competitors, we aim to search
for truth, knowledge of which will naturally lead to a better society.
For making decisions in such an immensely difficult question our
approach has to be scientific, based on rationality and logic. Therefore
if we stand behind an idea that someone proves to us being faulty, on
the grounds of logic and scientific evidence, it is in our interest to
immediately abandon it, reevaluate and change our approach, because
continuing to support an idea that's been proven to go against our goal
would simply be madness, working against ourselves.
An important thing we have to do in order to seek truth is to abandon so
called shortcut thinking. This is a kind of thinking that allows us to
evaluate various concepts quickly by simply remembering associations,
e.g. laziness is bad, theft is morally wrong, criminals should be
punished and so on. Shortcut thinking is necessary for functioning in
our daily lives, because our brains are incapable of fully evaluating
all concepts at all times, but in scientific efforts it can lead to
completely wrong results, because we simply avoid evaluation and
checking of facts that may no longer hold true. Shortcut thinking is
very often abused by politicians and used to justify goals and means
that are logically unjustifiable. We want to avoid this and so it is
required we try to evaluate concepts we are working with against our
goals and deduce the relationship ourselves.
Regarding idealism, we often hear critics say it is dangerous. Isn't the
pursuit of ideals – such as communism – what has historically caused the
most harm to the society? To this we say no. It has always only been the
violent and forced pursuit of ideals what caused us the unimaginable
suffering. But it is the force – not the goal – what has hurt us. On the
other hand, a non-violent, non-restricted pursuit of ideals, such as the
effort of countless artists to seek absolute and ideal beauty, or the
effort of scientists to seeks perfection with their theories, is what
has made us, the mankind, flourish the most. We intend to take a similar
road.
Our proposed non-competitive society is a superset of – besides others –
anarchism, pacifism, free culture, free software, multiculturalism,
non-violence, idealism and rationalism.
Regarding the terms left and right politics there are good and bad news.
We need to make clear what we mean by these terms as we will be using
them frequently.
The bad news is there is a considerable confusion about the terms and
their exact meaning isn't widely known, which is extensively abused by
politicians and populists. Part of the reason behind the confusion may
be that historically these terms have been used in ways completely
violating their correct meaning, e.g. by Nazis or nowadays the US
Democratic party – both very much rightist parties. Nazis called
themselves national socialists (socialism being a leftist concept), but
their actions and values were undoubtedly completely rightist (as
explained below). On the other end, communist regimes – pure communism
being a leftist concept – widely practiced rightist behavior, such as
totalitarianism. The good news is there exists an extremely simple
definition which allows to very easily distinguish between the two
terms.
Let's now present the definitions of left and right that we will use, as
we can find them e.g. at Wikipedia.^([WRL])
Some examples of rightist concepts are:
each other as competitors and owners, and internal, i.e. by organization
of their employees.
people – for example a nation – before other people is the definition of
rightism.
(more successful) stand above the weaker. It is well known to lead to
great inequality between social classes, exploitation of the working
class by the bourgeois, wage slavery, extremely unequal distribution of
wealth, great poverty and so on. Karl Marx and others did a great job in
describing these effects.^([MCM])
by definition a social hierarchy.
people is very clearly a social hierarchy.
Some examples of (true) leftist concepts are:
culture:^([FRS][FRC]) Granting everyone equal rights to usage of
information, technology and art is an effort towards eliminating the
hierarchy which arises when people are divided into owners (with all
privileges) and users (with limited privileges).
hierarchies and their causes, such as capitalism and states.^([AFQ])
prevalent means of force that is used to create hierarchies of stronger
above weaker. In a world without violence oppression of others (an
effort for creating a hierarchy) would be extremely difficult.
cultures and ethnics living together supports their equality and stands
against such rightist ideas as national or racial supremacy.
of human beings to also include animals, i.e. sentient life that can
also feel suffering. Vegans and animal rights activists may still not
oppose the natural hierarchy and food chains between animals and may
disagree on the question about lower level life, but their effort is
always directed towards flattening and at least partially eliminating
the hierarchy among life forms.
Some concepts such as communism were intentionally left out from these
examples because even though communism is based on a very leftist ideal
of a society of completely equal people, the wider philosophy advocates
controversial means (e.g. dictatorship of the proletariat), and also
historically the general meaning of the word has become associated with
practice of not very leftist implementations, such as Stalinism.
Let's also mention what we will call the pseudo left (or false left).
Pseudo left movements are usually called left and may possess some
aspects of it, but their behavior violates some fundamental ideas of
leftism. These movements typically come from the extremely capitalist
west where true left simply doesn't exist anymore, not even as a widely
known concept.
Some examples of pseudo leftism are (not surprising prevalently US
movements):
movement fighting for female superiority^([FES]) and gaining political
power, using means such as forcing ideas and laws, using violence and
bullying (legal, psychological and physical), pursuing a revolution
(which, as explained below, we are against). Examples of this include
the metoo bullying campaign or supporting codes of conduct^([COC]) in
free software development. This is in accordance with our observation
(explained later on in the text) that the name of the movement indicates
its goal – the movement is named feminism (implying female), not gender
equality.
through force and fear, no longer caring about equality, but about the
fight of homosexuals et al. against heterosexuals and everyone who
simply disagrees with the LGBT gospel (e.g. gay marriage and adoption of
children by gay parents). Their infamous pride marches have become a
demonstration of power and give an impression of military parades meant
to spread fear and war mentality. They also take part in aggressively
pushing harmful codes of conduct^([COC]) in software development. The
disinterest in actual equality is supported by the fact that LGBT
doesn't endorse sexual orientations that are nowadays unpopular and
whose support would cost them political power. These include e.g.
pedophiles, zoophiles and necrophiles, who are prosecuted as rapists and
criminals (just as gay people were just a few decades ago).
but they are a militant (violent and oppressive) group, using very
rightist means of fight, war, violence and oppression enjoyed by its
members, making them actually a rightist group that simply competes with
other rightist groups such as Neonazis. For this they are criticized and
rejected by true leftists.^([AFC])
nowadays very clearly only a historical label. Democrats today are as
much leftist as Nazis were. They are capitalists,^([DEC]) populists and
militarists and only a slightly less extreme right than Republicans, to
whom they serve as opposition, and so are called left just out of
convenience, not because of factual reasons. True left is basically not
present in the USA in any significant form, and there is no longer even
a wide knowledge among the people what true left means.
Just for the record, let us stress that we are for the social equality
of all people, both genders, gays and all other sexual orientations
including the ones that are nowadays prosecuted.
Those calling themselves conservative are usually rightist, because
conservatism means keeping the old values, which have prevalently been
rightist.
It has to also be noted that the common and traditional view of a family
– the one that prefers to benefit its members before other members of
the society – is by definition rightist. However, this is only one
possible view of family and so by opposing rightism we aren't opposing
families as such! Our view of a family is just different. To us, a
family is a group of people who are emotionally closest to each other,
and so they want to e.g. spend most of their time together. This is
completely supported by us. What we oppose is e.g. the idea of trying to
achieve better education for own children on the detriment of other
children.
Though our civilization likes to think of itself as advanced, it hasn't,
since its departure from the jungle, still solved the very basic issue
of unconditionally guaranteeing food and shelter for everyone, and it is
dealing with countless catastrophic issues indicating the opposite of
success: extreme large scale poverty^([POV]) while eight richest people
own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world,^([WDI]) wars and
crime, extreme destruction of life environment, moral decline,
surveillance and loss of privacy, restriction of people's freedoms,
aggressive advertisement, declining mental health^([MHD]) and happiness
of people, financial crises, terrorist acts such as mass shootings,
media control, plutocracy (loss of democracy) and many others. And
though people generally see these issues and acknowledge their threat
and necessity to be solved, very few make the extra step – or perhaps
are lead not to making it – of actually looking for the root cause,
which is the only place where the cure can be effectively applied.
Curing the symptoms is all the society is trying to do, even though it
is clearly not enough and just creates more and more issues. If we keep
asking ourselves why is this happening for long enough, we will always
get to the underlaying cause – capitalism, and eventually simply
competition and rightist thinking.
We will talk about capitalism and competition a lot – these two terms
are not equivalent, but from our point of view and in the context of the
analyzed issues we can use these mostly interchangeably. We see
competition as the ultimate root cause of the presented issues, but
since capitalism (a system based on competition) is absolutely prevalent
nowadays, very well observable and widely familiar to most people, and
it is at the same time the greatest manifestation of the presented
issues of competition, we will sometimes use the word capitalism as
meaning a society based on competition. Capitalism cannot exist without
competition and (as we will try to show) society based on competition
will lead to capitalism as we know it today (hence capitalism cannot be
fixed, as the only fix means getting rid of competition, which
immediately gets rid of capitalism). Capitalism may also be seen by some
as only an economic system, but when it is spread so widely as it is
today, it inevitably permeates other aspects of society, such as
culture, art, politics and the mentality of people.
Richard Stallman, the father of free software, has written in his GNU
Manifesto:^([GNM])
“The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we
encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way,
it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always
works this way. If the runners forget why the reward is offered and
become intent on winning, no matter how, they may find other
strategies—such as, attacking other runners. If the runners get into a
fist fight, they will all finish late.”
This itself is a good point, but many will argue this is a solvable
issue, and the reason why we have laws and rules for the markets.
Indeed, we have seen capitalism somewhat “working”. But if we take a
closer look at the principles of competition and also at what we're
seeing nowadays in the late stage capitalism, we will find that
unfortunately competition is unsustainable. Let's take a closer look at
what happens in the long run.
This graph shows a dependency of improvement on invested effort, called
a learning curve.^([LCU]) It applies to practically any improvement –
performance of an athlete depending on how much time he has spent
training, improving chess skills, quality of a product depending on how
much money and time have been invested into it etc. Note the
non-linearity of the curve – improvement becomes more expensive the more
we have already improved. Or in other words, improvement gets more and
more expensive over time. (Even though the curve may sometimes look a
bit different, e.g. have an S-shape, or even show accelerated
improvement at the beginning, such as in case of Moore's law, there is
always a point from which improvement slows down as we're approaching
the physical limits etc.)
For example if you decide to start jogging without having sported
before, you'll see a quick initial improvement – in a few weeks you'll
be able to jog even several times further and faster. But the more
you've improved, the smaller improvements you will see. When you've been
jogging for years, a few weeks of additional training will definitely
not make you jog several times further.
Why is this fact important to us? It will show us that what mr. Stallman
has said in his manifesto – competitors getting into fist fights – is
not something only the bad guys do. It shows it is what everyone
inevitably has to do if they want to win the competition. It is because
of this fact – improvement getting progressively more expensive – that
from a certain point only a minuscule improvement in the product or
service quality costs a company an extremely large investment. From this
point, the company can no longer effectively compete by improving its
product – pouring money in this effort will keep improving the quality
at a snail's pace and making it slower and slower. Since the company is
now in stagnation, its competitors will soon catch up with it, improving
their own competing products to a very similar quality level, at which
point small random fluctuations (such as fashion) will unpredictably
decide which company will be preferred by the customers.
What the stagnating company however can do to effectively spend its
money is invest in hurting the competition, or otherwise unethically
fight for their position at the top (e.g. by forcing the product with
false advertisements, using political power etc.). There are many ways
of hurting competition, legal (not necessarily ethical) and illegal. It
may simply be destroying the competition by buying it, fighting with
unfair prices, creating cartels, corruption, defamation, legal battles,
patent trolling, technological war, media war, getting unfair advantage
e.g. by secretly violating customers' privacy and so on. Even though
people will find temporarily lower prices a good thing, all of the
mentioned practices go against the beneficial promises of capitalism and
hurt the society, at least by creating monopoly, preventing actual
improvement and innovation of competitors, and some are downright
dangerous to the people and destructive to society.
A great recent example of corruption by capitalism is technology.
Purposeful obscurity by corporations seeking to protect their
secrets,^([FRC]) unnecessary burdening systems – such as DRM,
advertising or spyware – built into products, consumerism-driven
meaningless burdening features (bloat),^([SUC]) fight and hostility
towards objectively better ways (e.g. free as in freedom software),
against being able to repair technology (Apple), these are just some
features of modern technology that are not an exception – they are the
standard.^([TGE])
Companies can be seen as machines programmed for pursuing one goal –
profit at any cost, as much as possible. Not to innovate, not to
contribute to society, not to make people's lives better, just profit.
Laws don't pose moral standards to companies, they pose only an obstacle
that is to be overcome, bypassed or destroyed. A corporation is a
psychopath^([CAP]) who's been given an immense power to rule over
people.
A company is a machine that is intelligent, but has no emotions, empathy
or conscience like humans. It runs on humans, has humans inside, but is
structured in such a way that the resulting higher entity is not like a
human at all.^([CNH]) It exploits the intelligence of humans to make
decisions about how to best make profit, but since ethical behavior is
in this regard an obstacle, it has evolved to have mechanisms to prevent
ethical behavior. This often manifests itself in the employees saying
“don't blame me, I am just doing my job”. Everyone is just doing their
job, everyone needs to make living, no one can be blamed, and yet, the
company keeps doing horrible things. An extreme example of such machines
were the Nazi extermination camps, in which very few people would
approve of what happened at large scale, but thanks to the spread
responsibility and everyone just doing their job an unimaginable number
of people have been murdered.
Some still argue that companies are like people – only some have bad
intentions and behave in shady ways. They say only corporatism is bad
and that small companies are different. This statement is very far from
the truth, because in order to be successful in the world of hard
competition, a company cannot take on the disadvantage of only behaving
ethically. A small company that intends to survive is always an aspiring
corporation. Deciding to only behave ethically or not taking the chance
to become a corporation means giving up an advantage and ultimately
losing to those who behave unethically – just as in the jungle those who
decide to not take every chance to survive will simply die. It is simple
– if you don't do everything you can to beat your opponents, you will
lose to those who do. And indeed, taking a look at the real world
confirm this.
Yes, you may have seen a small company behaving nicely, or even a big
one doing something good as a PR move – this is possible. But in the
long run, the small ethical company will either get devoured by the
competition, or it will grow and be forced to change its behavior to the
unethical. The probability of a company behaving unethically and the
evil it does far surpassing the good converges to 100% as time goes on.
If we are interested in the future, improvement, stability and
sustainability, we simply have to look foremost at how our model behaves
in the long run, analyze the late stage, not the early or mid stages. In
the long run, competition degrades into oligarchy – rule of the winners
who only strengthen their position and weaken any potential threat of
opposition. The supposed benefits of capitalism, such as the principle
of supply and demand – i.e. what is demanded by people's needs is
encouraged to be supplied by the market – fall apart in late stage
capitalism, as demand becomes something corporations with enough
resources can arbitrarily control and create, e.g. by advertisement,
psychological manipulation, media manipulation, purposeful denial of
controlled resources, creating arbitrary issues to subsequently offer
solution to etc. There exist Internet companies that successfully sell
animal feces to people.^([SHE]) No longer are the true needs of people
controlling what the market should try to create, the suppliers (ruling
monopolies) themselves dictate what people should need.
This makes sense also from just logical viewpoint – the essential
principle of competition is to encourage progress by promising something
extra to the winners, and so motivating them to innovate. The capitalist
system promises to the winners power (wealth, fame) and monopoly (e.g.
the copyright or patent monopoly,^([CMO]) or just monopoly via the power
of money). This does encourage innovation at the initial stage when
everyone is on the starting line, but it eventually leads exactly to
what is promised – power and monopoly of the winner, which is extremely
harmful to the society. We should never promise such a reward in the
first place.
We can see it in practice – there exists no big corporation that doesn't
do something downright disgusting – animal cruelty, destroying the
environment, spying on people and selling their personal data, ads
targeted at children, cheating customers, abuse of employees. Take just
the tech giants: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, EA and many others,
all are burdened with progressively longer lists of unethical
behavior.^([TGE]) Non-technological corporations are no
different.^([CUB]) A corporation behaving like this isn't an exception,
it is a rule. A businessman, a marketing person, these are the symbols
of corruption, fraud and moral decline, the bad guys in every movie and
novel, yet we let exactly these people run our society.
Capitalists abuse shortcut thinking and try to deceive people by
promising freedom, however, this is not freedom for the people, but
freedom for the markets – freedom to pursue profit without being
restricted by ethics – which in practice means freedom to exploit others
and to restrict the freedom of others, via wage slavery, resource
control, media control, and other abuses of power. While people are told
they have the freedom to choose their job – that if they're dissatisfied
with working conditions, they can simply quit for another job – in
practice a person is unable to find a job in which he is treated well,
because as we've shown, companies must inevitably behave unethically and
abuse workers. Therefore this freedom of work choice in practice turns
to a freedom of a slave to choose their master.
Most experts, even capitalists, agree that a completely unrestrained
capitalism means a disaster^([UCD]) and that we need at least some
regulation of the market to assure such things as fairness of
competition or protection of the customers. Since, as we said, companies
have no conscience and only aim to make as much profit as possible by
any means necessary, an unrestrained powerful corporation will quickly
resort to unethical practice, destroying any competition and eventually
endangering the whole society. To prevent this, we have mechanisms that
are supposed to stand above companies and protect us – states and market
laws.
However, the capitalist system we have created has quickly allowed
corporations to evolve to hold such a power that they already far
surpass the power of many states, to break free from the cage meant to
contain the beasts. States and laws meant to protect us against
corporations are becoming just their tools. There will soon be no one
above the corporations and unrestrained capitalism is going to become
the reality after all. In this sense, the science fiction stories about
super intelligent machines that in pursuing a programmed goal get out of
control and proceed to destroying our civilization are becoming reality
just now, right in front of our eyes. The only difference is these
machines are not made of metal and wires, but of humans themselves,
organized in a destructive way.
Some people, even anarchists (namely individualists), blame the state
for the emergence of monopolies, and say that without a state the market
would be truly free and therefore somehow ethical. We strongly disagree
with this. A truly free market means a truly unrestricted and
unregulated market which we just showed to be disastrous for the
society. Even though as anarchists we are against states, we see markets
as a bigger threat, and we want to eliminate market before we eliminate
states. States are actually the only remaining obstacle standing in the
way of absolute power of corporations. Without a state, the strongest
corporation would take its place in ruling over people. It would start
creating its own laws and, unlike states which are at least supposed to
work for the people and common good, a corporation, by definition and
without hiding it, pursues only profit, so this rule would most likely
be the biggest suffering mankind has ever experienced.
Rightists will further argue that competition, and by extension
capitalism, is natural and simply works, and therefore we should support
it. While the first part of the statement is correct, the conclusion
doesn't follow.
Yes, competition is natural to us because of the natural process of
evolution – or survival of the fittest – of which we as a species have
been part since life appeared on Earth. It is natural to us as well as
killing, starvation, racism and wars which all come with evolution. We
see that something being natural doesn't at all mean it should be
supported because it doesn't at all mean it is good for us as
individuals. It also isn't true that the opposite of a thing that is
natural is automatically unnatural – it is possible that both things are
natural. For example, selfishness and violence are natural to us as well
as altruism and peace. In this case which of the opposite sides shows in
our behavior depends on which we decide to support.
This fact has been acknowledged by even the most prominent rightists,
such as Hermann Göring, the second man of the Nazi party after Hitler.
He said:^([HGW])
“The people don’t want war, but they can always be brought to the
bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them
they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in
every country.”
Evolution, and competing for the right to live, is a process of nature
to search for the strongest genes – in which sense it works – but not
for us, the individuals. Evolution doesn't aim to make us happy or not
suffer, it makes us slaves, laboratory rats taking part in the greatest
experiment in the universe. To us, evolution is just a cruel process. It
doesn't make us happier, it makes us suffer. It doesn't make us free, it
enslaves us by making it mandatory for us to constantly fight and
compete.
Having a society based on competition, for example by implementing
capitalism, works exactly in the same sense in which a jungle works to
make the weak suffer and only the strong survive. The whole purpose of
the idea of civilization, born out of this suffering, is to escape the
jungle, the cruelty, the enslavement, the unpredictability. By pursuing
civilization, we have consciously decided to pursue a social progress,
which itself means creating a very unnatural but better environment in
which no one – the strong, the weak, the working and non-working alike –
aren't sentenced to death or suffering. Or at least, we'd like to get as
close to as possible to this ideal.
Capitalism – a specific type of jungle – creates the illusion of working
by achieving nowadays the no longer relevant kind of progress –
technological progress – but fails to achieve practically any amount of
the important kind of progress we have been aiming for – the social
progress. In plain words, instead of rocks and sticks to fight each
other with we now have technologically more advanced rocks and sticks to
fight each other, but we are no more happier or less suffering than in
the jungle. Instead of making the progress of abandoning the concept of
a slave and its master we have simply replaced the master's whip with a
gun and the slave's wooden tools with tools made of metal. Nowadays we
are able to send a car around Mars or play one of many thousands hyper
realistic video games in virtual reality or on our pocket devices, but
do we really need it right now, for the price of still not being able to
guarantee basic human needs, of giving up our morals, irreversibly
destroying our environment and heading to a catastrophe?
Therefore it is crucial for us to understand that at this point when we,
humans, have suffered through evolution until now to become by far the
strongest species no longer threatened by others, evolution and
competition is from now on only harmful to us. By continuing to take
part in it we are paying the price of suffering for evolving further,
which is completely unnecessary and doesn't bring any more benefit.
We're buying something that's no longer useful to us.
Let's now stress that by abandoning evolution (improvement by
competition), we would in no way be giving up our further progress and
improvement, we would just choose different, non-harmful means, such as
collaboration. Let's also note that, as stated above, we wouldn't be
abandoning the concept of evolution and competition as such, just its
application to society. They would still be perfectly fine to be used in
entertainment (e.g. games), in science (e.g. evolutionary programming)
etc. We simply argue that while the board game of Monopoly is a lot of
fun and great to play with friends, it is unacceptably cruel to apply it
to the real world and let capitalists play it with real human lives.
(Did you know that Monopoly has been designed as a parody and critique
of capitalism? And that there is a recent version of the game that
promotes cheating as an inherent part of success in capitalism?)^([MOG])
One of the worst and most harmful prevailing conservative ideas is
regarding the question of work. By work we mean an unpleasant activity
that an individual is forced to do to be able to live, by which he
becomes a de facto slave. Conservatives, but also just wide population
in general, still believe that work (i.e. a kind of slavery) should
nowadays and in the future be the prerequisite to life, because it has
so far always been so. It is so deeply rooted in people's minds that we
have created shortcut thinking patterns such as more jobs equals good
and laziness equals wrong.
It is absolutely true that at the dawn of our civilization people needed
to suffer working in order to survive and later in history this has
still mostly been the case. With evolving technology less work was
required to be done in order to survive, but the parallel evolution of
social hierarchies has taken advantage of this established acceptance of
work slavery and started transforming it more and more into slavery of
many people to a few people. Nowadays this has come to an extreme – with
our advanced technology, only a very small amount of work is actually
required to be performed by humans in order to secure basic living for
everyone, but people are required to work no less in order not to die.
How is this so? Work has become a tool of capitalist slave masters,
utilizing e.g. so called wage slavery. An extreme abuse of people is
happening, people forced to work for majority of their lives in one way
or another. All this extra unnecessary work people are required to do
(so called bullshit jobs, such as advertisement or surveillance)
capitalists use to further abuse the people doing the work, the slaves
themselves! The false idea that a person has to work to such a degree in
order to survive is being heavily advertised and spread by the
propaganda of the slave masters (such as the current US president,
Trump), who actually succeed in making the brainwashed slaves themselves
support creation of more jobs (more slavery), when instead we, the
people, should be demanding fewer jobs! We should demand such things as
automation and universal basic income to make our lives less miserable.
Let us now focus on our idealism. We can say that true leftist extreme
is by definition a paradise without suffering, while the rightist
extreme is hell with everyone suffering except a negligible number of a
few individuals who are temporarily at the top. Therefore there is no
such thing as leaning too much to the left, it is always better to lean
towards left more – and this is why we are idealists. A nonsensical
argument often given to justify leaning towards right is that the
leftist ideal is an unreachable utopia. Indeed, a utopia it is as any
ideal, but as we have just written, being closer to a utopia is always
better than being further away from it. Leaning towards utopia is always
better than leaning towards dystopia.
Another argument against leftist utopias is that of a middle way – some
(namely the centrists) say we need a balance of left and right, and with
this we also disagree. While balance is better than the rightist extreme
(although still not really great), balance is always unstable, posing
the danger of slipping into the rightist dystopia. There is always a
tendency in the society to start slipping towards and extreme of the
principles it has chosen as its basis. We accept this fact and want to
exploit it by choosing the extreme and the principles to be (truly)
leftist, i.e. good.
Some people also argue that the effort of trying to achieve an ideal
(e.g. communist) society is futile because it has never been established
on a large scale in history (note that smaller scales have been
implemented, see below). That is like arguing our effort to send a man
to Mars is futile and that it's impossible because it hasn't yet
happened in history, or that we shouldn't try to cure cancer because it
is impossible for the same reason. We can see this argument fails in
disproving the possibility of achieving our goal, it merely indicates it
may be difficult, unlikely, or that we haven't yet reached the necessary
level of progress that would allow it. Everything has to happen for the
first time at some point – just as our journey to the Mars will happen
with technological progress, the achievement of a society we describe
here will come with social progress.
Let's add to this that the concepts of our ideal society, such as
anarchism and voluntarism, are and have already been working on small to
even large scales. In the context of the Internet and technology we are
just now seeing a rise of large, world-wide decentralized, distributed
and federated systems, networks and communities working without central
authorities, such as the Fediverse (a large network of interconnected
social networks), Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and systems based
on distributed ledger (e.g. blockchain), peer-to-peer networks such as
torrent protocols or PeerTube video streaming network, Tor network, free
and open source software development and the Internet itself, by design
having no central nodes or controlling authorities. Historically, there
have been many communities working on the same principles, such as the
land of Zomia, a community of about 100 million people living without
government and social hierarchies.^([ZOM]) The Free Territory of Ukraine
is another famous example of historical anarchist community of about 7
million people that has worked on the principles of federation.^([FTU])
An interested reader will be able to find a long sourced list of
anarchist communities e.g. at Wikipedia. A lot of basic income
experiments are currently being conducted, with positive
results.^([BIE])
A great myth, nowadays coming mostly from the capitalist west, is that a
fight is the only means to achieving a goal. We are told to accept that
our whole life will be a fight and that we will have to fight for what
we think is right. It is extremely important to realize that this is
false. Fight is but a one way, a way of sometimes being able to achieve
a quick success, but only a short term one, followed by downfall,
revenge of the defeated, having negative long term consequences. Fight
is usually one of the worst solutions, destructive to both sides, to
which life forms resort only in case of emergency, when there is no
other way. There are many other better solutions to issues and ways to
achieving goals, such as a discussion, diplomacy, education, cooperation
and non-cooperation, taking a stance, leading an example, and in many
cases even just ignoring or running away from the issue can be better
than fighting it. We, humans, the species that has evolved to no longer
be endangered by other species, with our highly evolved technology and
communication capabilities, practically no longer get to emergent
situations in which there is no other option that fight. Fear and the
necessity of fight is nowadays constructed and fueled by those in power
who are dependent on the existence of such society, as admitted above in
the quote by Hermann Göring – this is what we call a culture of fear, a
term popularized by Barry Glassner. Fighting has by now become
practically always the wrong way of solving issues. We think in this age
fight itself is wrong and therefore we won't fight for this idea.
Another myth is that competition and a motive of profit are the only
drives of progress. This is also completely false. People innovate
naturally for many reasons – out of necessity, natural curiosity and
boredom, seeking appreciation, experience and social contact, altruism,
out of habit, pursuing higher good and a meaning of life. Many of the
most innovative inventions were made by hobbyist and amateurs in their
spare time, without the goal of any profit! For example the Linux free
software operating system kernel that powers the Internet,^([LKC]) or
Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the world, written by volunteers.
Retired people keep working even when they no longer have to, simply
because a meaningful activity is what people want to do with their
lives.
We reject systems based on written law created and enforced by an
authority (a government). Such a system is unacceptable for a great
number of reasons and we, as anarchists, oppose it. For a detailed
explanation of the reasons see e.g. the great, free-licensed text An
Anarchist FAQ.^([AFQ]) Instead of written laws created by authority our
ideal society has moral laws.
But what are morals? Let us see morals simply as each individual's rules
of behavior that lead to good. To the immediate question of what is
good? we give an answer: good is simply our ideal society. We will also
sometimes use the term ethics – the meaning is similar, but while morals
are regarding individuals and may change depending on situation, ethics
are more general rules regarding the whole society and are usually
constant. For example, we say that capitalism is unethical in general,
and the act of collecting valuable items may and may not be immoral,
depending on the circumstances and motives of the individual who does it
– if the intent is to hoard wealth, the behavior is immoral, because
that leads to capitalism, but it would not be immoral e.g. as a part of
creating a public museum.
Aren't morals subjective? Largely they are definitely not – even if
different cultures in history showed different morals, any such
civilization always formed a large group of people sharing the same
morals (e.g. based on Christianity). We are intending to do nothing
different here, just make the group the whole world.
Our morals aren't any alien rules that people would have to relearn with
great effort, they are actually very similar to existing morals stemming
from Christianity and other religions. This is so because ideas of many
religions are mostly socialist and leftist (while unfortunately the
politics around religion is usually rightist, e.g. religious wars). For
example the teaching of Jesus includes non-violence, non-competition and
sharing (“turn the other cheek”, “if someone throws stone at you, throw
back also but with bread”), caring about others (“love thy neighbour”)
and many other socialist ideas. Buddhism advocates not doing harm, not
taking or injuring any life, not lying, and other similar life
conducts.^([BUD]) Sikhs traditionally run community kitchens (so called
langar, which can be found in most major cities) where anyone who comes
is served food for free, without the distinction of religion, gender or
ethnicity.^([LAN]) Islam also proclaims charity, tolerance, forgiveness
and kindness (yes, it really does).^([ISL]) So even though nowadays
these old morals are on decline, they have been and are a deep part of
our mentality already. We are merely improving and updating them, and
trying to revert their decline.
Morals of our society are defined simply by our common goal together
with the laws of logic. Any individual knowing and agreeing on the
simple common goal and having the ability to reason (which the absolute
majority of a more advanced society has) is able to deduce morals, and
verify the correctness of morals they learn from others. Note a
similarity with distributed systems resistant to altering by an
authority, such as distributed cryptocurrency systems based on
blockchain. In our system of morals the rules cannot be altered by any
authority because there is no outside authority making laws for the
people, the laws come from the inside, from people themselves, and as
such we have a true democracy. This eliminates the issue of laws being
manipulated by the powerful few – something unfortunately seen
constantly happening in society so far.
It indeed has to be said that predicting consequences of actions in
society is difficult and sometimes impossible and so people may
sometimes be unable to deduce what is right and wrong, or may disagree
on it. We acknowledge this, mistakes will happen. The important fact is
that in our ideal society people are not interested in enforcing their
opinions and agenda, but to truly look for the truth and are completely
open to being proven wrong, admitting own errors and changing their
opinions, as that is in their own interest. So there are the best
conditions for the truth to be found and mistakes be minimized.
It needs to be remembered that our ideal society is unreachable. This is
however no reason to despair – we intentionally create this ideal just
as mathematicians create ideal models that are very useful even though
they can never exactly match reality. This ideal model of society sets
us a direction and allows its comparison to various aspects of the real
world society. Our goal is to get as close as possible to our ideal
society.
Continuing with mathematics, formal theories are built on top of axioms
– simple statements that we take as true, without having to, or even
being able to be proven. The fundamental idea of our theory – our axiom
– is in this regard the same. It is a simple and general statement of a
common goal shared by all supporters of our proposed society. It is this
statement:
Living beings can feel joy or suffering. We, as living beings, want all
living beings (including ourselves) to equally feel as much joy as
possible, and to suffer as little as possible.
Or, in other words, to all according to their needs.
Note that this is a leftist goal because it seeks to benefit all living
beings, equally. A rightist version of the goal could be formulated as
well, stating:
I, as a living being, want myself (or a small group I am a part of) to
feel as much joy as possible, and to suffer as little suffering as
possible, even on the detriment of others.
Our leftist goal gives everyone a guarantee (as good as practically
possible) of never sinking to the bottom, because the members of society
will always care for every other being to be happy and not to suffer,
and will even sacrifice a little of their own happiness to eliminate the
suffering of others. The rightist goal is, on the other hand, a kind of
lottery – if you're lucky enough to be born superior or simply by pure
chance you may get to experience much more joy, but if not, you will
sink to the bottom and suffer – all or nothing.
We believe that when it comes to the matter of life, death and suffering
of all living, the vast majority of people will simply choose certainty
before lottery. It is also a known fact that the expected value of a
typical lottery is negative, i.e. mathematics objectively advices not to
play.^([LOT]) The lotteries we see in capitalism fall under this kind of
lottery – in the real world only an extremely small number of
individuals are successful. Therefore, logically, at least the vast
majority of the unsuccessful should be against this lottery, and on the
grounds of probability everyone should be against it. We hope to further
justify the leftist goal even more by showing here it is possible to get
close.
We are pure and idealist left, opposing both rightist and pseudo leftist
ideas (note the wording – we are against ideas, not people). Unlike the
right and pseudo left we do not see ourselves as fighting to win a
battle against the other sides, we do not wish wrong to those we oppose,
we do not seek to punish them or take revenge on them. That would be a
primitive goal dooming us to just repeating history over and over again.
We seek a higher goal. We seek exactly to eliminate this kind of
predatory and war mentality – not to win a war, but to eliminate the
war. Not to oppress those we oppose, but to eliminate any and all
oppression of anyone. By this we achieve our goal.
We want a society in which its members are guaranteed some basics rights
which don't have to be earned and cannot be lost. For example, in the
current society we've always had a de facto guaranteed right to one of
the very basic needs: air. No one has to deserve air, and air cannot be
taken away from anyone, not even the worst criminals (at least in the
more civilized countries that no longer have death penalty). We believe
this right is good and want to work to further extending the same rights
to other essential things, such as simply living in itself and having
individual freedom.
As leftists we are for social equality of all members of the society in
the widest sense, i.e. all humans and by extension also animals and all
that lives and can feel suffering.
Let us stress that we are only talking about social equality, not other
kinds of equality, because this work is only concerned with a social
framework. We don't at all advocate e.g. physical or intellectual
equality, i.e. we don't advocate political correctness, or hiding the
fact that there are differences between different races of people, or
the two genders, or making people physically equal. We take it as given
that people are different and we embrace the differences and diversity.
What we say is that as a society we want to prevent any suffering, of
everyone, indisciminately. Be it an important scientist, a criminal or a
mentally disabled person unable to achieve anything significant – all of
them can suffer the same, and we want to eliminate any suffering.
But if we allow pointing out physical and intellectual differences
between people and groups of people, such as making “sexist” or “racist”
jokes, without any censorship, won't it lead to discrimination? Will it
not negatively affect the idea of equality of all people? The answer to
this is very important to understand. In the spirit of looking for long
term solutions, addressing the root causes rather than curing the
symptoms, we simply want to establish that what is wrong is not pointing
out the differences, it is the discrimination (creating social
hierarchies) what is immoral. In our society without competition, there
is no incentive to discriminate, and so political incorrectness won't
lead to discrimination. If people accept our thinking, they will
naturally stop discriminating because it will no longer even make sense.
By introducing concepts such as political correctness we would be
putting in place unnecessary restriction on freedom, which is
unacceptable.
Some say that this is unrealistic – that if we tell people racism is
okay in speech but not in real life, they will never be able to separate
the two. To this we object! The current society proves the argument
wrong already – we e.g. allow the worst kinds of violence in art, such
as movies and video games, and despite some voices saying otherwise, in
practice we see that people are able to separate entertainment media and
real life, especially those with enough education and proper upbringing,
which we support and make an essential priority. In the same spirit we
don't at all mind the concepts that we oppose in the social framework –
e.g. capitalism, competition and violence – in other areas such as art,
speech, science and entertainment.
Talking about living beings and life, we may also soon begin to ask what
exactly classifies as life? As it's been indicated, we connect life to
suffering, which is our concern. Therefore for our purposes we will not
be using the biological definition of life – this definition serves
biologists well, but as will be shown wouldn't be good for us.
We will rather use a different definition – behavior that is, especially
in the area of suffering, similar to that of ours, of humans, we
consider life. Note that this is a fuzzy definition, a one that doesn't
give a binary yes or no answer to the question of what is life. It
rather gives us a real number value, a degree to which something is
alive. Such fuzzy definitions go along well with our ideas of moral
laws, not creating a black and white polarized sets, as is the case e.g.
with laws written and enforced by governments, which need to give binary
verdicts such as guilty or not guilty. With this definition of life we
are able to consider e.g. bacteria alive only to a very small degree
(because their behavior is very dissimilar to ours), and consider it
acceptable to kill bacteria in most cases. It makes vegans able to eat
plants, because these don't show signs of suffering similar to ours. It
also allows us to e.g. consider artificial intelligence progressively
more alive as it gets more and more human-like – once it starts to show
the ability to suffer as much as we do, we consider it alive and apply
our principles to it as we do to ourselves.
An important observation showing a big mistake of many movements is
regarding their focus on either the ends or the means. When a group sets
for itself a goal, it usually proceeds to specifying the means by which
to achieve it, often not realizing the danger of over time refocusing on
the means instead, forgetting about the goal, allowing the goal to
slowly shift – or most importantly be shifted – somewhere else
completely. Without keeping the original goal in mind at all times the
movement degrades, loses its direction but by inertia keeps its momentum
and becomes a dangerous out of control boulder rolling over the society.
This is how movements starting with equality as their goal end up as
fascists. Therefore we need to remember to always focus on the goal, not
the means, and specify the goal carefully and correctly – means will
always follow, and their justification can always be evaluated against
the goal.
How do we practically focus on the goal first? One way is to make
ourselves reminded of it constantly, keeping it visible at all times so
that any deviation from it is immediately clear and apparent, hits us in
the face and tells us to stop. For this reason the goal should be part
of the name of the movement.
There is a great example of two similar movements, one focusing on the
goal, the other on the means – we are of course talking about the free
software movement and the open source movement, respectively. While the
free software movement has been around for much longer, it still firmly
holds to its original cause – freedom of software users – and manages to
achieve it. The open source movement, on the other hand, has
intentionally ditched the word freedom and refocused on the means – a
source code that is open. While the open source initiative keeps a
definition of open source software that is virtually the same as that of
free software and so in theory both should be virtually the same, just
by this mental shift from the goal to the means we have seen a rapid
drift aways from the ethics and a loss of freedom in the open source
world, replacing the goal of freedom with profit of companies, happening
by playing tricks on the users, calling software that depends on
proprietary platforms open, and even starting to call programs and
licenses that don't pass the official definition of open as open,
leading to confusion and users who no longer neither know nor care about
the way to protect their freedom. Prominent examples include the Android
operating system or Microsoft buying itself the open source branding.
(Many so called open source supporters no longer make difference between
truly open source programs and programs whose source is available
without proper usage rights. They very often even lack the completely
essential knowledge to distinguish between them.)
Capitalism is yet another example of a system focusing on the means –
the capital, wealth, profit. By making capital the center point it
doesn't make any promise of leading to happiness or any other kind of
good for the society. And indeed, practice follows exactly. Arbitrary
justifications of capitalism such as the invisible hand have shown to be
completely untrue, as markets soon requires huge regulations to prevent
monopolies, cartels, unethical behavior towards consumers, other
competitors, workers etc.^([UCD])
Regarding the FSF, we've recently also seen a growing criticism of it
from their own ranks. However, this criticism isn't caused by the same
kind of issue, but different ones. For example, we hear critics say (and
we agree) that the FSF is using non-free licenses for their videos, i.e.
while being extremely strict about software freedom, they happily betray
these ideas when it comes to works different from software and so
violate the related concept of free culture.^([RAN]) But let's notice
that the organization is named the Free Software Foundation – free
culture isn't mentioned, it has not been their focus, and so, just as
we've been explaining, they aren't likely to achieve or contribute very
much to this cause.
Another extremely common and undesirable mistake regarding goal
definitions, likely stemming from capitalist thinking, is instead of
proclaiming “we want to achieve A” saying “we want to fight B”. This is
faulty because:
racism, poverty, inequality or anything else – implies our goal is the
fight, not elimination of the phenomenon. Our interest then lies,
paradoxically but by definition, in not eliminating the phenomenon, but
keeping it existing so that we can constantly keep fighting it. One
common and infamous example of this paradox is e.g. an anti-virus
company, which of course has an interest in the existence of computer
viruses.
the means – fighting – and in addition means that are wrong, as fight
often implies violence, which we, as pacifists, want to avoid, and which
should come as a last possible option, if at all.
This perhaps can seem like a time wasting playing with words, but let's
not forget that we want to base our effort on rationality and keep our
approach close to a scientific one. The definition of our goal is what
this approach will stand on and it is an absolutely essential part of
our effort, so in it, similarly as e.g. in the definition of axioms in
mathematics, we need to try to be extremely precise.
Freedom is something promised practically by any ideology, and in itself
the word doesn't say much, as there is no such thing as a general
freedom. Capitalists, for example, are for the freedom of market, which
means a freedom to oppress others. We are not for this freedom – we want
freedom of individuals that will allow them to live a life, experience
joy and no suffering – for example the freedom to live without working.
By advocating individual freedom we do not advocate the freedom of the
individual to do anything they want to, because that would of course
allow them to do things that take away freedom of others. We are for
example not for the freedom to do business, to kill people etc. We
should also repeat these limitations of freedom we won't enforce using
violence, but by non-violent means. However, we aim to restrict the
freedom of people as little as possible, to the absolute minimum
necessary degree.
One of the freedoms implied by this individual freedom, and so a freedom
we very much support, is an absolute freedom of information in general.
We are against any intellectual property laws (as we are against private
property in general, and against monopoly^([CMO]) laws), i.e. we want
all information to be in the public domain, available and uncensored,
just as it has already been the case e.g. with mathematical formulas.
These causes are all in accordance with our ideas, and are also
supported by many groups that are not associated with us. Reasons for
supporting some of these causes are given by people like Richard
Stallman^([FRS]) or Lawrence Lessig (in his book Free Culture).^([FRC])
We are additionally against any markets, money and private property
(though we are not against personal property, i.e. possession).
Unconditional exchange can still happen, but we see it as immoral to
arbitrarily make a person deserve something they need, which in our
society of non-competitive and selfless people we equate to what they
want. That is we are against demanding pay (which a person may not be
able to afford) and discrimination between people based on what they can
offer. If the seller needs something in return for their goods, they
have the same right to simply take it. We also believe that supply and
demand markets will always tend to lead to competition and capitalism.
Finally, let's remember that even if our goal may be extremely difficult
to achieve – probably much more than any other social change in the
history – it will be enough to get there just once, because the goal
society is stable – unlike societies based on competition, conflict and
balance, in which tension is always present, and will sooner or later
lead to its collapse.
As we have stated, we are always and foremost focused on the goal, the
means will always follow, and they have to always be subjected to
reevaluation against the goal. As soon as the means are seen to not lead
to the goal or go against it, we have to abandon them.
Furthermore we highly, and in some cases exclusively, prefer means that
are themselves in accordance with the goal – choosing means that are in
conflict with the goal, for example war in pursuance of peace, is wrong
because by that we are legitimizing what we are trying to delegitimize.
We are generally against violent revolutions, which are favored by the
pseudo left. One great issue with the revolutional approach, and that is
the social inertia and disagreement about when to stop. If we choose
violence as our modus operandi, then firstly we have to agree when
exactly to stop, which will cause great disagreement and even if we
somehow agree, there will be great disagreement about whether we have
already reached that point as measuring the amount of our success is
impossible to do precisely. Keep in mind that because of the nature of
our goal, being an ideal model, it will most likely never be reached, so
we can't simply say we'll stop using illegitimate means when we have
reached the goal. And even if we somehow succeed to agree we should stop
using the illegitimate means at some point, by the force of inertia and
habit some would keep still using them as it is impossible to completely
revert behavior of a big group of people in an instant – so we would now
have a group of people that we ourselves have created that stands
against our goal.
For these reasons and others (such as revolution simply being a violent
change that inevitably brings unnecessary suffering) we choose the
evolutionary approach, or – to avoid confusion with biological evolution
which we showed to be undesired – a slow, peaceful change.
With this in mind we have to realize that we're required to think far
beyond the scope of our own lifetime. This is difficult to do, but it is
ultimately what we have to do and what we predict people should be able
to do more and more as a result of the intellectual and social progress
of mankind – in important decisions relying on our intellect and
rationality, not instincts and emotion, abandoning selfishness and
pursuing greater long-term good for as many people as possible,
including those in the future. The greatest minds and visionaries of
history, foreshadowing what an advanced intellect looks like, already
show this kind of thinking far beyond their lifetime. In this we want to
be the same and by it we are one of the first humans to show this
advancement in intellect, which should, also thanks to us, become common
in the future. We must not do this for any reward, or expect any but
knowing we sincerely do good and our lives have an important meaning.
Nevertheless, if things go well, we may still live to see and enjoy some
early fruit of our effort even for ourselves.
So, our methods of operation are non-violent, because we believe our
proposed system is superior to other systems and if you have something
superior to offer, you don't need to force it. We are not even tempted
to force our ideas because by our own rules enforcing acceptance of
anything automatically means we've lost. We wish to eliminate the
distortions (such as propaganda) and by it make it clear our way is the
best. Methods we can use are for example:
on the grounds of logic and by providing scientific evidence,
such as capitalism, consumerism, proprietary software – as much as
possible,
solutions, revealing corruption, spreading awareness, teaching critical
thinking, revealing populism, deception etc.,
status quo,
developing tools for breaking censorship,
software, helping charities,
and friendly behavior, collaboration and establishing our values.
Note that what would be unacceptable to do to humans – e.g. starve them
to death – is generally not unacceptable to do to companies, because as
we've shown, companies are not like humans at all, and we don't consider
them alive – and of course, they are what we seek to eliminate. To us,
it is therefore not immoral to steal from companies or otherwise work
towards their elimination and towards the benefit of people at large.
We furthermore prefer means that are good in long term before those that
achieve initially better results, but bring more evil in the future, as
we are looking into the future, to create a stable society, to solve
problems slowly but once and for all.
We can try to make an analogy (of course keeping in mind all dangers of
analogies) between means to solving social issues and means to solving
e.g. health issues. A drug (a small dose of poison) can be an effective
short term solution to health problems of an individual, but it just as
well comes with worse effect in long term, especially when it gets
overused. If a person is depressed because of circumstances of their
life, a dose of heroin will likely make the depression go away for a few
hours, but it needn't be said this leads to a disastrous life in a
matter of months. A better, long term solution is to try to solve the
cause of the depression, to try to fix the person's life circumstances,
even if that is not as pleasing in the immediate. This extreme example
is here to demonstrate what kind of solutions we prefer – the long term
ones. To us capitalism is like heroin – it should never be in wide use
or a basis for solving issues. Its only acceptable use should be under
strictly controlled condition in an isolated laboratory.
Therefore, very importantly, we are for example against any use of
censorship – that is hiding ideas, media and opinions from the public,
even partially. Censorship is a short term solution, bad in the long
run, additionally in conflict with the freedom of information and
sharing, and typically requiring some kind of censoring authority, which
goes against anarchism. Censoring an idea is easy, and so it is a
tempting way of making it go away for a while (and a nice way for
temporary politicians to achieve quick results), but it is not the
correct way of dealing with an erroneous idea. The correct way is
proving the idea false. Censoring an idea also psychologically leads
people to firstly get interested in it as in forbidden fruit, and
secondly see it as more likely true, because if it could be disproved,
why would it need to be censored? Finally, if censorship is legitimized
as an acceptable practice, it becomes a weapon of propaganda and of
authorities against the people, countless examples of which we don't
need to point out here.
And so even if we are against Nazism, we will defend the right of Nazis
to be heard and will even help them be heard, so that their ideas can be
submitted to rational evaluation, publicly refuted and rejected.
As supporters of absolute information freedom and opponents of the
concept of intellectual property we are against imposing restrictions on
the use of our educational material, such as this very text. The FSF, in
our opinion wrongly, uses ND (no derivative) restrictions on their
materials to prevent others from removing or changing the ideas they
spread.^([GND]) This is in our view wrong because we don't want to
create gospel. (Another argument stating that no derivative licenses
prevent altering someone's opinions is also invalid – incorrect
attribution of statements is simply lying, which is firstly not meant to
be an issue addressed by copyright, and secondly if someone's goal is to
lie, they can always avoid infringing on copyright.) We simply spread
truth we have discover via our effort so that others can see it and
don't have to needlessly waste the same effort. The truth we spread can
be verified by logic (which will typically require much smaller effort
than discovering it, just as mathematical proofs are typically easier to
check than to discover). So if anyone modifies our statement to an
untrue one, it will simply become a verifiable falsehood and sane people
(whom our proposed society produces) will be able to reveal this.
We are also against censorship of any kind of pornography or other media
capturing crime (not necessarily today, but eventually, as a part of the
described slow change). Besides the above given arguments against
censorship in general, we don't believe that watching a footage of crime
should be considered a crime, that would be just another unnecessary
restriction of freedom, which we oppose. The supposed justification of
the opposite is that allowing illegal pornography increases demand of it
and encourage producers to commit more crimes. This is firstly about as
much true as saying that USA prohibition decreased the demand of alcohol
– it didn't, it just gave rise to mafia – and secondly, demand requires
a market, and since we are ultimately against markets, market demand
can't rise in our world, because market doesn't exist.
Regarding non-violence and pacifism, a very common question asked is: if
the other side uses violence, how can we protect ourselves? A lot has
been written about this topic, so we won't go into much detail, but we
have seen non-violence working in practice against violence many times
in the history, e.g. with Gandhi, Martin Luther King or the Velvet
Revolution. We therefore know that non-violence works, at least against
some kinds of violence.
In our ideal model of the society violence has been completely abolished
by everyone, but as rationalists we have to also consider the fact that
in practice there will probably always exist cases of violence against
which non-violence may be completely ineffective. Let's imagine for
example a lunatic, simply unable to think rationally, going on a killing
spree, to kill as many people as possible. How would we deal with this?
In our perfect, ideal and unreachable society that doesn't use violence
at all, people would view this the same way they would view a natural
catastrophe, such as an earthquake or asteroid impact, against which
they are completely powerless, and they would simply accept this as a
disaster. They could run away and hide, but would generally let the
lunatic do what he does – wander around the world and kill people, until
he dies of old age. The society would be hurt, but would survive. The
people who would have died wouldn't have died in vain – by not defending
themselves they would have helped keep violence an illegitimate means to
rational people, keeping the society safe from its abuse.
Considering such advanced mentality is probably beyond our reach even in
far future, we accept that some minimum amount of violence or force will
probably always exist as a means of defense, and we can tolerate this
fact, as long as it really is the absolute minimum and the mentality
regarding violence is correct. We will never consider any use of
violence a victory, but a loss, just maybe a lesser evil. We will never
celebrate anything achieved by violence. In the case of the dangerous
lunatic killing people, in a world close to the ideal, we would likely
immobilize him without hurting him or causing him suffering, and put him
in a place where he could not continue to further kill people – keeping
in mind this would not be a prison! We wouldn't seek to punish the
person, just to prevent killing of more people.
Yes, with non-violence we often get hurt, but so is the case with using
violence, and in the end with just living in the real world. Not hitting
back is what stops further violence and allows better means of solving
conflicts, such as a discussion, to take place.
Some critics of non-violence argue that use of violence can be justified
because it can prevent greater violence from happening, and that can be
true, but only in the short term. We think further – our goal is to
delegitimize violence as such in order to prevent all possible violence
in the far future, and so we choose non-violence even if it means we get
hurt more in the scope of near future.
Critics can also be heard saying that it is simply not possible to make
people change to become completely non-violent. They say violence is
naturally in us, and will stay in us for a very long time to come,
because evolution of species is a very slow process. To this we have two
answers:
peaceful behavior, and which one shows is determined by which one is
fueled. Therefore what is natural to us depends greatly on the
environment. Both peaceful and violent natures have been given to us by
evolution because we have experienced different environments in which we
needed both. Therefore if we create an environment that doesn't fuel
violence, violence simply won't show.
fast under certain conditions, e.g. selective breeding (which in our
society could be occurring naturally, at least in part, by females
choosing to have children with men who share their moral values). With
some effort, wild foxes that are completely hostile to humans change to
friendly pets in just a few generations.^([ECD])
People have no incentive to fight a system that is truly and verifiably
designed for and working for their good, as they would be fighting
against their own good. Violence in such world doesn't make sense, which
is why in our society violence and resistance can come only from
lunatics who are unable to think clearly.
We acknowledge that at the present day there are many individuals, such
as radical far right activists, for whom it is too late and who are
practically impossible to be convinced to change. However, we are
looking far beyond the time of this generation, the time when these
individuals will long be gone. At the current time we aim to influence
just some people, who will further go on to influencing others and next
generations by adopting some of our ideas and passing them to their own
children.
Upbringing (and not just by parents but by environment at large) is an
extremely powerful force determining the nature of an individual. Note
that again, in the spirit of non-violence, we are in no way talking
about forceful upbringing, as that very often leads to achieving the
exact opposite – the child later radicalizing against the ideas they
were force fed – not talking about causing suffering to the child. We
are talking about upbringing by leading an example and growing up in the
right environment. For example, even though by evolution nakedness is
the natural thing to people, they do the unnatural and all wear clothes,
because they simply grew up among people who all wear clothes. Wearing
clothes is not a force fed idea, it is a standard in our society, and we
see practically no people rebelling against this standard. In the same
sense we want our moral values, such as non-violence or opposing
competition, to become the same standard.
Even though we're non-violent and non-revolutionary, we are still
strict. We want to steer the wheel slowly but firmly.
Similarly with other issues, by the nature of our slow change approach,
for some time we will have to tolerate and sometimes even keep doing
things we disagree with – e.g. tolerate centralized governments. We may
participate in the system, vote and try to make it better by passing
laws that will do less harm, while in the meantime working on getting
rid of the system. We may sometimes use free licenses for our software
and art, even though we fundamentally disagree with the concept of a
license. On the other hand, if it is moral from our point of view, it is
good and desirable to voluntarily make rapid and significant changes,
for example to never use proprietary software, to never eat meat, to
actively work against global warming and so on.
Keep in mind that even though we are strictly against companies, that is
organizations whose goal is profit, we are not against organizations in
general! We support formation of non-profit organizations and nowadays
see them as a great way to contribute to society in the framework of the
current system. We know non-profits currently suffer from imperfections,
such as some similarities to companies, but their goal is absolutely
correct (and correctly reflected in the name non-profit), and practice
indeed shows they usually do much more good than harm, which is only
small and very tolerable. These small imperfections will be fixed as our
cause is advanced.
It is clear by now capitalism and competition have infected all vital
parts of our civilization, and so it is impossible to abandon them at
once without doing an immense unacceptable harm of immediately
destroying the basis of the society without having an alternative ready.
Our first focus has to be on curing small parts of our society and
establishing the foundations for the alternative.
For example, nowadays practically every single piece of an intellectual
work – even hobbyist, educational and by intent non-commercial – is
protected by some kind of intellectual property law, which is advertised
by the propaganda as preventing exploitation of the author's work, which
may be partially true, but at the same time, which is no longer part of
this advertisement, preventing use of the work for the benefit of
society – remixing and improving – the kind of use our culture has been
dependent on since its birth until the recent copyright maximalism has
appeared.^([FRC]) By the same logic used to justify copyright we could
state that a murder is justified because it prevents the victim from
dying of cancer. The very worst part is however that the propaganda is
successful in making the authors themselves believe the partially
censored truth, making them thoughtlessly support the laws and stick the
all rights reserved to anything they create. As a result, in this
society practically every hobbyist and even many charities sworn to
helping the society at wide will want to keep their copyright, letting
business further into areas where it should never belong, killing the
public domain, the idea of completely free sharing and business-free
mentality. We think that in the near future it is crucial to achieve a
society in which this kind of thinking is changed and in which there are
at least some places again completely free of business.
How to achieve this? We need to educate, spread awareness, lead an
example and support change of laws. People must first understand the
issue – e.g. the issue of proprietary code, hence basic education in
programming – then see the solution – education about free software –
and finally demand and achieve the change. So if we teach about such
things as free culture, free software, universal basic income and other
socialist concepts, and show working examples, the perception of these
issues will become wider and people may start demanding change of laws,
for example abolishing automatic copyright or reducing its term and
scope. This will lead to more public domain and free as in freedom
works, its bigger role in society, and ultimately the mentioned curing
of one part of the society.
We need to constantly keep working on changing the mentality caused by
shortcut thinking and wrong associations from old times. Stress that
creating jobs is wrong, we need to eliminate jobs, automate everything
and strive for all people to lose their jobs so that they can do
voluntary meaningful activities. It is extremely important to realize
and accept that life must never be something to be earned, as well as
lack of suffering. One of our short time goals is therefore to implement
universal, unconditional basic income.
Most importantly, we need to teach people to simply think – the
important skill of critical thinking – to be able to educate themselves,
be resistant to populism, lies and falsehoods, and be creative in
further pursuing the goal. A common man has to become an independently
thinking man.
So, in conclusion, how can you, the reader, help? What specific steps
can you make right now if you have, at least partially, identified with
our ideas? In accordance to these same ideas we will not give you a
simple authoritative answer, we don't want to give orders. We simply ask
you to think and let yourself be influenced, verify the logic yourself
and let the ideas be present with you, and as result in your future
actions. In some time, your life decisions will start to become subject
to the questions we taught you to ask. Perhaps if you are an artist, you
will decide to share some of your art freely and dedicate it to the
public domain. Perhaps if there is a political party advocating some of
our goals, such as universal basic income, you will decide to give it
your vote. Perhaps when passing a homeless man on the street, this time
you won't look away but will give him some money or buy him food.
Perhaps you will decide not to support corporations if you don't have to
and you will rather play a free software video game than buying a
proprietary one, or you will even consider switching to a lower paying
job which serves the society better than your current job. Perhaps you
will decide to share this text with other people. Helping make the world
a truly great place to live is the best cause we can ever dedicate our
lives to.
Modern technology suffers immensely from the power of corporations that
run the world, as we have already said. Here is what we imagine
technology should look like in a better world, and which we therefore
seek and prefer to use. As modern technology is dominated by computers
and software, these will be our focus now, but the general ideas apply
to all kinds of technology.
Our foremost priority is to use and create exclusively free
software^([FRS]) (sometimes referred to as open source, but we greatly
prefer the former). This is not only because of the common reasons of
security and its general better quality but also because of our support
of information freedom and opposition to capitalism and centralized
control. To us, the best form of free software is completely unburdened
public domain free software (i.e. public domain source code) because of
our mentioned opposition to the idea of intellectual property. Our
definition of free software includes all parts of the software, i.e.
even non-functional data. With this definition we are closer to Debian
than the FSF.^([DVG])
Secondly, when the software is free, we prefer so called
suckless,^([SUC]) KISS, minimal, good enough, reusable software,
following at least some of the principles of the Unix philosophy,
because we are concerned with accessibility and efficiency. Let us
stress that this applies to all kinds of technology, even that such as
video games. For any technology we highly support hackability,
transparency, maintainability, portability and the ability to be easily
repaired. A piece of software should be maintained by as few programmers
as possible and understandable by as many programmers as possible, be
highly reusable and have as few dependencies as possible in order to
survive and last for as long as possible, in order to not waste effort
on reinventing wheels as we're used to in the current proprietary
industry. We believe that this kind of technology is the natural kind
and will come when the unnecessary bloat resulting from capitalism no
longer encumbers it. This doesn't mean we can't create complex
technology, just that it shouldn't be more complex than it needs to be
to help people.
For these reasons, if we are presented with the choice, we prefer to
avoid capitalist inventions that don't adhere to the above, such as C++,
Java, OOP in general, heavyweight IDEs and platforms etc. This is only a
preference, not a strict rejection. We however strictly reject languages
such as C# that are either proprietary or de facto owned by a
corporation.
Furthermore, in the spirit of anarchism, we are for autonomy and
independence of technology users, i.e. decentralization and distribution
of computer systems and the capability of working offline. We oppose
modern capitalist trends going against this, such as clouds, DRM or
software as a service (SaaS, or more correctly SaaSS – service as a
software substitute). We are not against servers and centralized
technology per se, e.g. archives or game servers, as long as they don't
create social hierarchies, don't take away the freedom of users and
don't endanger our society in other ways. This applies not only to
software, we think more technological autonomy and decentralization is
needed, not only to prevent abuse, but also to prevent disastrous
scenarios of central node failures, such as blackouts, to which
capitalism exposes us nowadays. People should be allowed and encouraged
to make their own electricity, tools, food etc.
We are eternally grateful for what Richard Stallman (RMS) and his Free
Software Foundation (FSF) have achieved in showing the malicious nature
of proprietary software, defining free software, promoting and
supporting it, showing it not only works but mostly even outperforms
proprietary software, and mainly strongly holding to strict ethics as
the main drive beyond the movement.
We, however, have a word of criticism about the FSF as well. For
example, despite being extremely strict about free software, they do not
support the related concept of free culture. The FSF states that
non-functional data (e.g. art assets in video game) that are part of
software don't have to be free, i.e. are an exception from the four
essential freedoms. They routinely use non-free licenses, such as
CC-BY-ND, for the media they create (e.g. videos of talks or texts).
Their GNU free documentation license (GFDL) allows to include invariant
(no derivative) sections,^([GFN]) making the licensed work not free,
despite the name. GNU Verbatim Copying License is another non-free
license from GNU. Furthermore their preference of copyleft is something
we tolerate as successful means of preventing harm by corporations, but
do not fully endorse, as copyleft is based on restriction via copyright,
which is something we don't support. The Gnu General Public License
(GPL) itself is a free license, but it is also a long, complex legal
text, existing in many variants (GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, AGPL etc.) and with
many conditions that don't make forking and sharing very easy in
practice. We highly prefer public domain, or at least permissive
licenses (MIT etc.) that make sharing and reuse easier.
Similarly we are very grateful for what Lawrence Lessig and his Creative
Commons (CC) have achieved in helping generalize and spread the ideas of
free software to also include culture and art, making it easy to
practice free culture and subsequently even helping free cultural
licenses get somewhat into the mainstream.
However, we have to express criticism on the address of Lessig and CC
too. Lessig says in his book Free Culture that he is ultimately for the
concept of intellectual property. Additionally the book Free
Culture,^([FRC]) the bible of free culture, is not free-licensed (it has
the ND restriction) and so is not part of free culture itself. At the
very least it looks extremely dishonest to betray an idea by the very
book that promotes it! Additionally we have to express sadness about the
fact that CC offers non-free licenses – NC and ND – and that they are
widely confused for free licenses. CC correctly inform on their website
these licenses are not free, but not in a way that would prevent the
confusion. There are additionally issues regarding the licenses
themselves – e.g. the CC0 waiver, supposed to dedicate a work into
public domain, intentionally doesn't waive any intellectual property
rights besides copyright (such as patents or trademarks) in order to
make it possible to make profit off of the work.^([CNP]) But by this,
confusingly, the waiver actually sometimes does not achieve public
domain (which is defined as a body of works free of any intellectual
property, not just copyright). This complicates use e.g. for software
(and there is currently no alternative for dedicating software to public
domain), and generally goes against the idea of creating a work that
stands outside of the business sphere. It seems that Creative Commons
are not serious about free culture.
We recommend reading Nina Paley's RANTIFESTO^([RAN]) which voices
similar criticism. There are unfortunately no movements that would
strictly and seriously promote free software, free hardware and free
culture at the same time.
We are also very grateful to Gandhi for his non-violent movement's
contribution to society, and to others that followed him such as Martin
Luther King. We extremely value that Gandhi not only taught us the
principles of non-violence, but also demonstrated that non-violence is a
legitimate and effective tool, practically usable on large scale. We
however don't identify with all Gandhi's values – Gandhi was, unlike us,
not an anarchist, as he e.g. supported strict legislative restrictions
of freedom, e.g. alcohol prohibition.^([GAN])
The Open Source movement is (from historical point of view) a relatively
recent fork of the Free Software movement, and as such still carries on
some good of it, though from the start it has taken a very wrong
direction of abandoning the interest of people (ethics) and replacing it
with business interests, which quickly lead to its corruption, and so we
do not support the Open Source movement, though as free software
supporters we often get to collaborate with them. Open Source definitely
did help in creating and supporting many great free software projects,
but the bad it does is already starting to surpass the good. Due to
refocusing from the goal (ethics) on the means (open source) companies
like Microsoft are able to abuse the open source brand and slowly shift
the goal towards their own interests (which is fight against free
software). Microsoft is already seen trying to become the owner and
defining force of open source, by buying GitHub, infiltrating Linux
development, spreading its propaganda (“Microsoft loves Linux”) and so
on. The movement itself, having lost the sense of the original goal,
already starts to accept software violating free software definition and
even their own official OSI definition of open source. The open source
supporters, such as Linus Torvalds, don't share our concerns about
proprietary software, and are often even supporting it. We want to have
nothing to do with this.
In previous chapters we have explained why movements such as feminism,
LGBT and Antifa are not leftist movements but pseudo leftist – because
of their means of operation and at least questionable goals – and so we
do not support them, even though we usually support the idea that may
have been present during their birth, i.e. equality of genders and
sexual orientations and opposition to fascism.
We have more sympathy for organizations such as PETA (who are not a
movement, but a non-profit organization). PETA aren't aiming to gain
rights for themselves, but solely for others – in this case animals –
and that in an honest way. The purpose of their sometimes vocal and loud
behavior is, similarly to that of the FSF, attracting attention for the
cause, not spreading fear and pride of superiority, as is the case with
feminists and LGBT members.
We fully support veganism and ethical vegetarianism, as these are
completely in accordance with our values.
greatest living anarchists and scientists, in the article Noam Chomsky:
Antifa is a 'major gift to the right', by Maya Oppenheim, 2017,
(accessed on 2019-08-23): “When confrontation shifts to the arena of
violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who
that is. That's quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the
opportunity for education, organising, and serious and constructive
activism.”
Collective,
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq
.
hospitalizations, and specifically hospitalizations for accidents and
injuries and mental health diagnoses, declined for MINCOME subjects
relative to the comparison group.” The remarkable thing that happens to
poor kids when you give their parents a little money, by Roberto A.
Ferdman for
, 2015: “Relationship between spouses tended to improve as a result […]
Parents tended to drink less alcohol […] Some of the families, given the
boost, even moved to areas with slightly better census tracts in terms
of both income and education.” Further references and a list of basic
income pilots can be found at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots
.
Brill, 1988. Page 12 discusses so called noble eightfold path: “right
speech: not lying”, “right conduct: not killing or injuring”, “right
livelihood: living from begging, […] not possessing more than is
strictly necessary”.
criteria for psychopathic behavior in the paper Corporation as
Psychopath, by Martin Brueckner, in Encyclopedia of Corporate Social
Responsibility, 2013.
law, giving exclusive rights on use to the author or inventor,
prohibiting practically any use by competition without the permission of
the copyright/patent holder. This is commonly acknowledged, e.g. Lessig:
“The drug companies that produced these life-saving mixes enjoy at least
a twenty-year monopoly for their inventions.”^([FRC])
Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath: “The bank is something else than men. It
happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the
bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the
monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.”
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.txt:
“No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned,
surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.”
developers should interact and it has recently become an infamous weapon
for forcefully pushing the LGBT and feminist propaganda in free software
development. COCs are anti-free speech and hurt free software
development (i.e. a true leftist cause) by pushing important developers
out of projects based on their political opinions or behavior (see e.g.
the famous case of Linus Torvalds being forced to leave the development
of his own project, Linux) and preventing rejection of incompetent
developers who are under the protection of the COC. The most prominent
COC is probably the Contributor Covenant, used e.g. by Linux, Go and
Ruby on Rails, made by Coraline Ada Ehmke, a transgender LGBT activist.
probably don't need to be pointed out very much, but some examples
include the symbol of capitalism, Coca-Cola (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Coca-Cola
, accessed on 2019-08-23), cigarette companies (Chesterfield, Camels,
Marlboro) falsely advertising smoking as healthy and even targeting
children, or General Motors devastating the city of Flint by closing
their factories, leaving thousands of people unemployed (portrayed in
Michael Moore's 1998 documentary Roger & Me). Companies are frequently
against protection of employees by unions, see e.g. the article Delta
told its workers to buy video games instead of unionizing (
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/5/10/18564745/delta-anti-union-video-game-poster
, accessed on 2019-08-24): “The seemingly union-busting tactics are
cringeworthy, but they’re not unusual.” The Delta posters read: “Union
dues cost around $700 a year. A new video game system with the latest
hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues
to the Union.”
publicly said at the CNN town hall in 2017: “We're capitalists, and
that's just the way it is.” According to Gallup inc. polls in 2018 about
a half (47%) of Democrat supporters prefer capitalism to socialism.
https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html#not_just_code
, accessed on 2019-08-23): “we apply our standards of freedom to all
parts of all software in Debian. This includes computer programs,
documentation, images, sounds, etc.”, vs GNU free software definition (
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.en.html#non-functional-data
, accessed on 2019-08-23): “We don't insist on the free license criteria
for non-functional data.”
N. Trut, 1999: “In the sixth generation bred for tameness [the foxes]
are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention
and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs.”
to surpass men, e.g. “Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.”,
a quote by Timothy Leary. Though this has been criticized by prominent
feminists themselves, such as Betty Friedan, the movement's attitude
didn't change.
http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf
.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
, accessed on 2019-08-20.
Marshall, 1992, page 473: “He took the initiative in organizing an area
of some four hundred square miles with a rough population of seven
million into an autonomous region […] Anarchists were in charge of a
large territory, one of the few examples of anarchy in action on a large
scale in modern history.”
Gandhi confirmed he was for complete prohibition in new India. An
Anarchist FAQ^([AFQ]) also says in the section A.3.7 Are there religious
anarchists?: “we must stress that Gandhi was not an anarchist”.
4. MODIFICATIONS (
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html#section4):
“You must […] preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document,
unaltered in their text and in their titles.”
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OpinionLicenses
, accessed on 2019-08-23.
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html
.
1946.
416: “the righteous is he who […] gives of his money, in spite of loving
it, to the near of kin, the orphans, the needy, the wayfarers and the
beggars, and for the freeing of slaves”, page 214: “In addition to the
countless references to forgiveness throughout the Qur’an, there are
numerous examples of the practice of it in the life of the Prophet, who
is celebrated [as the 'perfect human']”, page 415: “Of all the human
virtues, the Qur’an insists most frequently and most urgently on
benevolence to the poor, the needy, the stranger, the slave and the
prisoner. This is expressed in the form of compulsory alms-giving
(zakat) and, more importantly, in the form of voluntary charity
(saclaqa).” Muslim's Character, translated by Mufti A. H. Usmani, 2004 –
chapter 14: “Hardness be Replied with Softness. […] He should consider
overlooking of the errors of the wrongdoers as a kind of gratitude to
Allah”, chapter 15: “[Islam] has advised [its followers] to treat others
kindly, to act righteously, to help their kinsmen and to do all kinds of
good and virtuous deeds”.
Michel Desjardins and Ellen Desjardins, 2009. Also on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langar_(Sikhism)
.
software in history, it powers most Internet servers and a lot of other
computers. Its creator, Linus Torvalds, started the project as a hobby,
without the goal of profit, and made it free as in freedom.^([FRS]) In
his book Just for Fun he writes: “The most important part of the project
was to just figure out what this machine did and have fun with it […]
Everybody knew I wasn’t making any money on Linux.” In a famous e-mail
from the beginnings of the project he states: “I’m doing a (free)
operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like
gnu).”
Business Insider article The Mega Millions jackpot is over $500 million
— we did the math to see if it's worth buying a ticket, by Andy Kiersz,
2018,
https://www.businessinsider.com/mega-millions-lottery-jackpot-expected-value-2018-3
.
10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/01480-7.
Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
1848.
2017,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-mental-health-declining-in-the-u-s/:
“Suicide rates per 100,000 people have increased to a 30-year high […]
Disability awards for mental disorders have dramatically increased since
1980 […] They found that the toll of mental disorders had grown in the
past two decades […] Over the past two decades mental illness has become
the second most common cause of disability in the U.S.”
Mary Pilon for
,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/business/behind-monopoly-an-inventor-who-didnt-pass-go.html
, accessed on 2019-08-19: “[Elizabeth Magie] designed the game as a
protest against the big monopolists of her time.” Monopoly Game:
Cheaters Edition, released in 2018, comes with such promotions as
“Complete a cheat to get a reward, but fail a cheat and pay the
consequences!”
Poverty?, by Martin Ravallion, 2013: “At the time of this writing (in
2012), the available data indicate that 1.2 billion people in the world
live in poverty.” Investment and Development Will Secure the Rights of
the Child, by Dr. Ernest C. Madu: “About half of the world’s 2.2 billion
children live in poverty, and 300 million go to bed hungry each night.”
https://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/04/rantifesto/
, accessed on 2019-08-23.
, accessed on 2019-08-19.
, accessed on 2019-08-23.
corporations on his website
under the section What's bad about (accessed on 2019-08-20). These
include spying, censorship, patent trolling, worker abuse and tax
avoidance by companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Netflix,
Google, Intel and others. Techrights website wiki at
(accessed on 2019-08-20) offers similar summaries under the section
TechWRONGS, e.g.
http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/List_of_Microsoft_Sins
.
(American economist, Nobel Prize laureate, member of the
capitalist^([DEC]) Democratic party), 2011,
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117714241429793.html
(accessed on 2019-08-23): “I [hoped] the financial crisis would teach
Americans [about] the need for greater equality, stronger regulation,
and a better balance between the market and government.”
benefits everyone, not just the privileged few, by Deborah Hardoon,
2017.
accessed on 2019-08-24,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics
.
Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott, 2009 – from preface: “[Zomia] is an
expanse of 2.5 million square kilometers containing about one hundred
million minority peoples [who] have not yet been fully incorporated into
nation-states. […] Virtually everything about these people’s
livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially)
even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings
designed to keep the state at arm’s length. […] Not so very long ago […]
self-governing peoples were the great majority of humankind.”