Individual human minds may be smart enough to recognize when things are heading in a bad direction, but the Collective is not, and therefore neither are those who unthinkingly serve it. When central control increases to the point that free individuals become powerless to change the system, things have started to go down a bad [...]
Positive law is a list of rules which must be obeyed – even if those rules aren’t things that folks would normally care enough about to use violence to enforce. In order to have these rules enforced, the Collective needs a special group of people willing to use violence to make other people do whatever [...]
Every time you hear a scary political slogan you are being played for a sucker. [...] Politicians take mountains of money away from people to spend it on imaginary fears that they create from scratch. The problems will never actually be solved but that really doesn’t matter. In fact, if the problems ever were solved, [...]
Governance began as persistent theft, with the guy who led the best band of raiders becoming the boss. It was only after this point that rulers began to justify themselves as protectors. They were really just maintaining a monopoly over their human herds. – God Wants You Deadby Sean Hastings and Paul Rosenberg Behold, how [...]
Once people accept the external valuation of a Higher Power, they are highly unlikely to go cold turkey. They may however, switch drugs, converting from one Higher Power to another, provided that they do it with intensity. In religion, it is a common observation that converts are always the most observant and faithful. It is [...]
… In closed markets and/or less-open cultures, corporations can have powerful identities. In Japan, for example, many people feel privileged to work for their corporations and attribute a great deal of identity and benevolence to them. In the United States, large corporations will also contain many people who treat “the corporation” as a specific entity, [...]
Collectives often present themselves as being necessary to protect us from ourselves. However, more human death and suffering have been caused throughout history by large scale conflicts between competing Collectives than could ever have been caused by conflicts between individuals. People sometimes kill and steal from each other because of self interest but it is [...]
Just as the identities we create for other people and things help us model their behavior, the identities we create for ourselves help us model our own behavior. We have a great deal of control over our own behavior, so our predictive models, in some respects, are also self-fulfilling prophecies. If you think that you [...]
Rarely do people hold feelings of neutrality about any ideology. Few people manage to ignore the higher level structure and consider the component ideas. This means that you can usually consider someone who despises a philosophy as a whole to be just as brainwashed as someone who embraces it completely. A person may know all [...]
Parasitic ideas need to be helpful, or at least not too harmful, to the idea-organism in which they reside, but they can be very harmful to individual human beings. So long as they help (or do not badly harm) the idea-organism’s chances for survival and reproduction, they can cause all sorts of pain and death [...]
