U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths

Yes, it’s from the Onion… and straight to the point as always.

Millions of U.S. flag–related injuries and fatalities have been reported over a 230-year period in locations as far flung as Europe, Cuba, Korea, Gettysburg, PA, the Philippines, and Iraq. In addition, the company found that U.S. flag exports to Vietnam during the late 1960s and early 1970s resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, a clear sign that there was something seriously wrong with its product.

Despite fears about the flag’s safety—especially when improperly used or manipulated in ways not originally intended—sales continued unabated over the years, potentially putting billions of unsuspecting people in danger.

“At first, we wanted one of our flags in every home in America,” Burman said. “Unfortunately, the practical applications of this product are far outnumbered by the risks it presents. Millions have died needlessly, and when you ask people why, they point to the flag.”

Added Burman, “Frankly, we should have pulled it off the market decades ago.”

Why our social structure is invalid. [part 3/3]

Parenting is another hierarchy which is not only based on the imagination (there is really no such thing as a “parent”) but also entails drastic inequality. The child, by his mere child status, is deemed to have no rights of his own, and has little actual protection against abuse. The end result is that millions of children ever year are beaten, verbally abused, sexually abused, kidnapped, ritually mutilated, have their free time controlled, told what to wear and what to say, and indoctrinated into bizarre belief systems which narrow their capacity to understand the world in later years, to give just these examples. Any single one of these abuses of human rights would be considered absolutely unacceptable if they were performed on adults; parenting necessarily relies on ageism, more specifically the hatred of the young, in order to justify its abuses of human rights. It is often claimed that parenting exists out of love, but it is hard to understand how a system geared towards near-total control of an individual indicates love for that individual. In no other field would we use such twisted reasoning; one rarely hears of fascism or state communism, for instance, as paradigms of love in politics, even though they put a heavy emphasis on controlling the individual.

The influence of inequality on our freedom even extends to our mental freedom, such as the freedom to construct our own sense of identity. Through the media, and its far-reaching influence on public opinion, we are bombarded with archetypes and categories within which all individuals are filed and from which they are evaluated, such as gender roles, ageist targeted marketing and race stereotypes. The laws also provide a whole panoply of these (“criminals,” “drug users,” “sex offenders,” “immigration,” married, and so on).

I think I’ve discussed enough examples for the general principle to be obvious: systemic inequality entails generalized loss of freedom, and vice-versa. We can also safely say that the more profound the inequality, the more profound the loss of freedom. And although I did not really discuss the opposite movements, I believe we can also say that structural equality entails a generalized gain in freedom, and vice-versa.

While these principles also apply to the individual’s own adherence to this or that system (i.e. when we are part of egalitarian systems, we are more free, and when we feel more free, we seek out egalitarian systems), they apply more directly to society as a whole. Individuals can only be free in an egalitarian society, and an egalitarian society can only be a society where individuals are free. Individual autonomy and social freedom, self-determination and social organization, free will and order, are linked together and follow each other. Any ideology which only resolves one part of the equation has failed to grasp the nature of what it was trying to resolve. Eliminating some inequalities, but keeping others, will generally not improve the state of society as a whole.

To understand why, you must understand that natural rights, no matter how many people deny their existence, do exist, and what’s more they exist necessarily. All rights are claimed by someone or some group; the less rights claimed by the individual, the more rights are claimed by others. Unless the individual is able to regain control, his rights are open for the taking by any other hierarchy that persists in his society. Eliminating capitalism alone would merely open the door for greater statist controls over work and life as a whole. Eliminating the State alone would merely open the door for more corporate economics-based control of behaviour. Likewise, the near-elimination of religion from Western societies has merely delegated various forms of norm enforcement (such as sexual norms) and psychological comfort (such as the fear of death or failure) to the political and economic realms.

The statist will no doubt reply that complete individual autonomy is not only a surefire recipe for chaos, but that it cannot lead to equality because every individual will seek his own advantage over everyone else. On his side, the classical liberal (of which so-called American “Libertarians” are merely a branch) will reply that social freedom is an attack on the individual’s property rights and that these are the source of autonomy above everything else, that property rights are the foundation of all rights, and that without property everyone is at the mercy of “society” (i.e. that from which they, the atomistic individualists, feel they are excluded).

To answer the statist, one merely needs to note two things: that the State itself is a major and profound source of inequality, as I’ve already described, making his own proposed solutions complete dead-ends, and that we have nothing to fear from people seeking their own advantage within a society whose institutions are structured in an egalitarian manner. Obviously, where power is less concentrated, we have less reason to be concerned about people wreaking havoc than when the most power is given to a few individuals at the expense of everyone else. Also, and this is a side issue, it’s been shown many times that people who are given a certain level of autonomy over a given area, or simply seize that autonomy by themselves, will tend to establish egalitarian structures over it (the Argentinian self-managed businesses being the latest example of this).

To answer the classical liberal, one may argue that property rights are not at all a necessary foundation for all other rights, and that making property rights the foundation of all rights results in some major paradoxes, as established by Block’s Corollary, the child renter argument, and other similar arguments. In fact, property rights perhaps have the distinction of being the worst supposed right to use as a foundation for rights. The charge that ending the concept of property endangers autonomy is more serious, but we can give basically the same answer that we gave to the statist: it is a society plagued with hierarchical institutions which tries to control the individual, not an egalitarian society. State Communism did not, and cannot, work, because giving control of ownership to a State is the recipe for ultimate tyranny. But an egalitarian system of ownership, founded on the concept that individuals must deal with each other as equals, act only on the basis of agreement, and have equal access to society’s production, can only enhance individual autonomy. The concept of property rights, on the other hand, only ensures autonomy to those few who can afford it.

Both positions are rooted in the belief that man is innately evil and that we need some kind of control mechanism to counter-balance a state of total individual autonomy or total social freedom. Their objections also assume a hierarchical society, insofar as they assume that controlling others on the long term is always viable (obviously I’m not talking about, say, someone mugging someone else, or any other a form of control that is always possible in any system). In any hierarchical society, such extremes are purely theoretical, since hierarchies necessarily represent an attack on individual autonomy and social freedom to begin with. A society that is both hierarchical and free/egalitarian is a pure logical and organizational impossibility.

There is also a whole body of propaganda that says we are already all equal and all free; it is manufactured and constantly added to by scientists, economists, philosophers, scriptwriters, and various other members of the academia or the media. Their main goal is to hide the motivations and actions of the class of people which controls the apparatus of production and prices, the apparatus of violence, our own preferences (through the gigantic machine of marketing, more than a trillion dollars’ worth), law-making, the options we’re given at the voting booth, and so on. None of it is worth anything except as an exploration of the mindset of its believers.

We are taught that we are free because we have the right to choose our masters, and the right to complain when they don’t fulfill their promises. These two conditions are really all that is needed for people to believe that they are free. We also have the freedom to consume within our limited wages, and the freedom to have as many children as we want so they can repeat the cycle. These, no one objects to. Rights are granted so that the individual may be a better worker and a better citizen. Freedom of thought does not exist, which also entails that free will cannot exist. The concept of a “marketplace of ideas” is as vacuous and fictional as that of the “free market” presented to us by propaganda. It is just another concept designed to hide the fact that our beliefs and preferences are constantly molded and reinforced by forces wholly outside of our individual control.

Why our social structure is invalid. [part 2/3]

The inequalities inherent to capitalism function in pretty much the same way. Capitalism is a planned economy partitioned into units that wildly vary in size (small and medium-sized businesses, corporations, multinationals), controlled by the highest ranks of these units. Although capitalist theorists always try to portray “the market” and “consumer preferences” as the driving forces of the economy, these abstract concepts really only hide the fact that some people are in control of the means of production and use this control to impose their values on everyone else, just like law-makers impose their values on their subjects. When economists talk about economic freedom, they really mean the freedom of these elites to steal, acquire and take away capital at will, just like how political freedom usually refers to the existence of independent nation-states. The “freedom” and the “values” that matter are those of rich white sociopaths in suits.

If we look at reality instead of textbooks, we see that the net result of capitalism is a general attack on freedom. With the support of its international institutions and the ideology of neo-liberalism, which drives the ever-expanding capitalist machine, and its need for always lower wages and lower production costs, into more and more “developing nations,” planning units plunge entire populations into poverty, in some cases outright slavery, and subjugate them to the colonialist logic: “you exist to service our needs, not yours.” For these populations, there is no economic freedom possible. They are trapped and at the mercy of the “developed” world. From the economic inequality which resulted from prior colonialist waves can only come a further degeneration of economic freedom.

The great inequality between the employers and the individual workers means that employers can set their terms and dispose of anyone whom they find too inconvenient or too unreliable for their purposes. The “freedom” of the worker is therefore the same as that of the voter: to have a hand in choosing his master. Certainly the average worker has no freedom as regards to his work, except that which he can eke out when the masters are not looking.

But most importantly, employers grab a large percentage of the money gained by selling the worker’s production, called profit, preventing the worker from receiving the full product of his work. The employer, who centralizes capital, continues to accumulate capital, and the worker is left with narrowed possibilities of consumption, and by extension production. Since money is the prime measure of economic freedom in a capitalist society, economic freedom will therefore tend to be centralized by the planning units and their leaders. Like all other forms of usury, profit is the symbol of the fundamentally parasitic nature of capitalism: parasitism against individuals, societies and the world.

The union was supposed to be a force that would equalize this imbalance, and for a while it accomplished great positive steps, until the structure of the union itself became calcified, and, as happens to all movements which become successful, the survival and power of these organizations, not the welfare of the workers, became their first priority. Political experience has shown that unions are necessarily pro-work hierarchy because they depend on that work hierarchy, the dichotomy between employer and employee, for their very purpose; their survival depends on workers not being free. Self-management, that is to say libertarian socialism, is in no union’s interest.

Between the planning units and specific governments, there is also a vast intersection of collusion, policies made for vested interests, conflicts, and so on. Wars and neo-liberalism are two great examples of this. Once again, the outcome of these maneuvers will depend on where the balance of power lies, but they very rarely come out as a positive for the average citizen. To use an example relevant to my topic, the inequalities between firms leads to the adoption of public policies which favour big firms against smaller firms (for example: barriers to entry, minimum wage laws, eminent domain, strict patent laws and intellectual property laws), which further concentrate economic power in a few hands.

Besides the two major hierarchies, there are of course many others. I would put the hierarchies of religion, sexism (which nowadays is largely reducible to religion and commercialism) and racism in the same category. I draw a sharp distinction between these hierarchies and the two previous ones, because these are founded on, and justified by, an imaginary power. Political power and economic power are real, but sex, race and gods are all imaginary. Therefore there are two considerations: the inequality that is real, and the inequality that is imaginary. That being said, it is also obvious that both have an impact on society, because it does not matter for social purposes whether a belief is real or imaginary: as long as people believe in it, they will act on it, and thus there is an impact in both cases.

However, there is a way in which the imaginary nature of the power does make a difference, in that it makes the belief itself as important as actions. When we look at economic power and political power, there is no question that those forms of power exist, and no one considers belief or non-belief in them very important. No one wakes up in the morning wondering “gee, I think maybe money is just meaningless pieces of paper” or “maybe policemen really can’t hurt me after all.” Within the framework of our society, these are not reasonable things to doubt (this is not to say that I really do believe that money and policemen are unquestionable in all contexts). Where imaginary power is concerned, belief takes on paramount importance; but this has the advantage that individuals can exorcise its baleful influence on themselves simply by ceasing to believe, an advantage which does not exist with real power.

Religion differs in that its source of moral superiority is not an imaginary human attribute but rather an imaginary all-powerful being (or beings). But in all these hierarchies, the result of the imaginary inequality is to position oneself in the “superior group” and to delegate moral responsibility to some other construct outside of ourselves. In religion, worshipping the correct god in the right way means that one is “saved,” and follows the moral and ethical code ostensibly given by the god; the dramatic inequality between the god and the follower merely ends up being an added motivation to surrender moral responsibility. In sexism, having the correct set of genitals means that one is “a man” or “a woman,” and therefore innately worthy of respect on that basis regardless of one’s actions. In racism, having the correct skin color means that one is of the correct race, and therefore innately morally superior. One’s actions performed on the basis of being in the “superior group” are automatically justified, regardless of their nature.

When we surrender moral responsibility, we give up on part of what makes us human beings: our capacity to empathize with other human beings, to be social animals, to see others as more than masses of flesh. The prototype of this lack is the sociopath, who is born without a conscience, without empathy, and without higher emotions like love and compassion. But human beings can be made sociopathic as well. The soldier, who has been turned into an obeying automaton and has been trained to objectify the enemy, is necessary less than fully human.

But ultimately all hierarchies are sociopathic, because they, by their very nature, create an elite which pursues its own interests and the interests of the system at the expense of everyone else’s. As I’ve discussed many times before, this is not because the people populating the system were evil or sociopathic from the beginning: all we need is to assume that people will naturally seek to use the power available to them for their own best advantage. For example, the corporation is sociopathic (as I’ve recommended before, watch the movie The Corporation for a full explanation of this point) because the people who populate its decision-making levels seek profits, which both helps the corporation they work for (their “team”) and helps them preserve and improve their own careers. Issues such as constant fraud, massive pollution, violence and slavery against third-worlders, the gambled livelihood of the workers, and so on, necessarily take a backseat to the constant search for profits, even though we would qualify individuals who support such things as sociopathic.

One may argue that these inequalities only affect those people who are not part of the “superior group.” But if we look at the situation in a more global manner, we see that everyone is someone else’s enemy. No one is really safe from being oppressed, even the non-elite members of the “superior group,” although obviously those who are privileged in a given society mostly have the upper hand. Either way, it should be obvious that the greater the real inequality, the most devastating the effects on freedom as a whole. The race and religion-motivated wars led by the United States, for instance, prove that religious bigotry and racism can bring about genocide. We should also not be reminded of the millions of people who still live in fear in our very own societies because of homophobia.

Continued in part 3.

Why our social structure is invalid. [part 1/3]

The proposition that equality and freedom are two sides of the same coin is the shortest and most accurate refutation of politics and economics that one can write.

The entire study of politics, from its inception, has been concerned solely with the State: its justification, its powers, whether it should be limited and, if so, how it should be limited. This idea of limitations on the power of government, which they call democracy, is praised as a form of equality, even though it preserves the concept of government more or less intact: all governments are forms of domination and subjugation.

The power of capitalism is subject to the same general kind of analysis. The entire study of economics is concerned solely with justifying the planned economy we have under corporatism. Sure, we talk about limiting this planned economy through government intervention, and we call this the “welfare state” or somesuch, but the concept of capitalism, or its “development” around the world, is never in question. People who do so are “extremists” and are intellectually marginalized. Capitalism is called individual freedom, when it is in fact exploitation on a worldwide scale.

The concept of a State cannot exist without the power to create and modify laws, as well as the power to enforce those laws (this is not to say that laws cannot co-exist with cooperative rulesets, as long as they are enforced as the ultimate standard). A law is nothing more or less than the will of the State; no law has to conform to the innate principles of justice, and most laws do not. Without the power of laws, its will, a State can no longer exist and perform its “functions,” and becomes merely a country club for sociopaths. The best proof of this fact is that no government has ever been based on the consent and good will of those it claims to govern.

The concept of laws necessarily entails a hierarchical society, where equality is strictly impossible, because it entails a strict separation between law-makers and the subjects of the laws. Through the laws, law-makers’ values are enforced on a population of people with differing value-systems, generating oppression on a social scale. This leads to people being morally and ethically unfree, that is to say, unable to express their values in the way they desire, and unable to help build a community or society which reflects their beliefs about human needs and the goals of social relationships. The individual is forced to position himself as “law-abiding” or “law-breaking,” with the suffocating consequences of the latter, instead of actually being able to think and act on the basis of innate justice. Such an individual is therefore theoretically only free as long as he acts within the margins of acceptability, which is really no freedom at all.

And because these laws define everything political, including democracy itself, the means by which the citizen supposedly influences politics, the law totalizes political power from the point of view of the average citizen, and focuses the energies of “concerned people” on trying to influence law-makers, people who are of a different class than they are and share no interests with them, instead of actually making a difference in their societies.

The argument that Anarchists, civil libertarians, atheists, and other freethinkers wish to erase exterior standards because they want to be free to be evil is therefore only part of the story. What we call “evil” is, most of the time, really a disagreement about values. As an Anarchist, I do not wish to let a murderer get away with killing people, but I also do not wish to “reeducate” him, as I am not arrogant enough to believe that my values are superior to his. So in that regard, certainly I wish people to be free to dabble in all the things I consider errors, as long as they don’t hurt people who don’t wish to participate.

But the larger point which needs to be made about Anarchism, civil liberties, atheism, and freethinking in general, is that we wish to erase exterior standards because they rob the individual of moral responsibility. Conservative Christians hypocritically hail moral responsibility as the cornerstone of freedom, but Christianity is a textbook example of moral irresponsibility, down to its very core doctrines. So is the concept of law. The law not only justifies violence, hatred and self-repression when it is used against “criminals,” it also justifies all the unethical, disgusting actions which hurt and kill other people by not condemning them. The individual’s freedom of thought, as extensive as it might be (and it is rather limited in our society, where we are indoctrinated and categorized from childhood), is absolutely useless to that individual, or his society, without the capacity to express the results of those thoughts.

Looking at the issue of force, we see that there is a whole hierarchy of users of force and people who control these users of force. This system, which relies on an exclusive (therefore elitist) right to use force granted to soldiers, policemen and bureaucrats, entails that the use of this force will benefit those soldiers, policemen and bureaucrats, and the people who control their actions. There is really nothing one can do to protect himself, let alone retaliate, against the State’s apparatus of force. The result is that soldiers, policemen and bureaucrats, on a daily basis, murder, beat up, falsely imprison and ruin the lives of innocents without being upheld to the laws they supposedly enforce. As I pointed out before, the State and its agents are not subject to the laws, or if they happen to be, they easily change those laws to retract themselves from public scrutiny, claim that it is in the national interest for things to remain secret or, as in the case of international laws, simply ignore the laws. Even mere policemen literally get away with murder on a regular basis.

The freedom of the citizen against the soldier, policeman or bureaucrat is therefore something akin to the freedom of a battered woman: we are forced to tell ourselves that innocents getting killed, beaten up, falsely imprisoned or ruined is “for our/their own good,” even though this is childish nonsense. But there is a drumbeat of propaganda designed to make us believe that this or that group within our society is an enemy and that we must be protected from it, coupled with the more ideological propaganda that everyone is evil or corrupt at the core and that we all need protection from each other. So this childish nonsense, this battered wife’s fantasy, becomes accepted fact.

At the intersection of law and force, between the diktat and the gun, from the will to the deed, stand a lot of different mechanisms, processes and systems. It is important not to let all the trappings of democracy, parliaments of dunces, and that constant, annoying mosquito-like media buzz distract you from the fundamental realization that a State is a monopoloid apparatus of force, and that all political speeches, debates and rants basically amount to answering the question of how and against whom force is to be applied; and furthermore, that answer is almost invariably going to be, not the State itself, not the power elite, not corporations, not the privileged, but either you or someone like you. This is not to say that “the common people” never, ever win anything within the democratic system; sometimes some group of concerned citizens gets to weight in on some issue where there is infighting amongst the power elite and manages to snatch a victory, but in general the power imbalance between these groups and their opponents is gigantic.

The center points on which the relation between law and force gravitate are taxation and inflation; these are the translation of the State’s desires into reality. It is therefore vitally important for the State to keep control over monetary policy and to keep its gigantic web of taxation over as many human activities as possible.

I’ve pointed out how the inequalities inherent to statism lead to lack of freedom, but the process is not one way: lack of freedom also means that people are unable to stand in the way of the creation of further inequality. In fact, using one or the other as the starting point is purely arbitrary. One way of seeing it is, inequality is what we see when we look at the structure itself, while lack of freedom is what we see when we look at its consequences in the larger society. Both co-exist at the same time and influence each other simultaneously, forming a dwindling spiral which constricts truth, free will, and general well-being. Groups and movements which are built on equality and freedom work in the same simultaneous, self-reinforcing way, but in the reverse direction.

Continued in part 2.

Love Police – The Corporatization of Open Space

Dear Freedom Fighter Who Shot Me…

An open letter from a US Army veteran to the freedom fighter who shot him.

The US Government and the US corporate media would say that you are a terrorist, but you are not a terrorist. I was a terrorist. For that I must offer my deepest apologies and ask your forgiveness. I must also thank you. The bullet that you used to protect yourself from me changed my life. That day, you shot holes through everything I had grown up believing about America fighting for freedom and liberty. Your bullet, like a seed, penetrated far beyond skin and muscle, and sank deep into something in the core of my being where, over time it grew to be something much greater. It grew into a world view that included people outside of the United States of America as human beings and equals. It grew into an understanding of my place in the world and my part in the suffering of other people and the part that the United States Empire plays in the world as one of the greatest enemies of freedom and justice that exists.