Pictures for Sad Children strip- Merry Christmas!

I post Internet comic strips once in a while when I think they have some relation to socio-political issues and are well written. Here are three of them from the comic Pictures for Sad Children, another favourite of mine.

Merry Christmas and see you in 2011!

(click for bigger version)

Conformity

Atheism and Anarchism: ideological cousins?

Some people believe that there is a strong connection between atheism and Anarchism, others believe there is no such connection. Certainly it is true that Anarchist thinkers have been strongly unsympathetic to organized religion and tend to be atheists, but the reverse has not been true. Why is that? And what is the connection?

Anarchism is a position about society and undesirable structures within it (that is to say, the belief that hierarchies are unjustified). Atheism, on the other hand, is an ontological position (about the existence of gods). But if you ask atheists why they see the need to label themselves and discuss atheism, they will almost invariably answer you that Christian dogma infiltrating itself in the schools and politics is the main issue. Therefore atheism does reduce itself to a social issue to some extent.

I think the issue that links them both, therefore, is the concept of authority. Atheists reject both concepts of authority in Christianity: the authority of God over man, and the authority of organized religion against their believers and society as a whole. Anarchists merely reject other forms of authority which any individual atheist may or may not reject.

And in a sense, this does show Anarchism and atheism as similar, insofar as most arguments an atheist uses against Christian authority can also be used against other forms of authority. I have already explained one case of this, the impossibility of transferring exterior obligation. Atheists may, for instance, argue that Christian principles are unethical and clash with modern sensibilities; Anarchists often argue the same thing about laws. Atheists argue that a supposedly good god is incompatible with the existence of evil in the world; Anarchists argue that a supposedly good State/economy/etc is incompatible with all the evils that it creates in the world. Atheists argue that a specific religious belief system should not be imposed on the whole of society; Anarchists argue the same thing about political belief systems. This similarity arises from the fact that the arguments are based on what is specific to authority: the disconnected sense of ethics, the factionalism, the attempt to control society, and so on.

There are also resemblances in the way both approach epistemology. Atheists are very concerned with teaching others how to approach supernatural claims and how to distinguish true from false beliefs. They seek to uphold a rational, evidence-based, skeptic attitude towards these claims. Anarchists have a very similar concern towards economic or political claims, and seek to uphold a rational, evidence-based, skeptic attitude towards them. Both are extremely suspicious of arbitrariness, factionalism, presuppositionalism (attempts to make a belief system true by default), Special Pleading, and the attempt to put teleology as some kind of default which underlies natural processes.

The very latter point is equally important, insofar as both atheism and Anarchism believe in what I would call emergentism, the worldview which states that properties of units at one level of discourse are the result of the interactions between units at some lower level of discourse (e.g. that the properties of societies are the result of the interactions between individuals, that the properties of organisms are the result of the interactions between organs or cells, and so on). Atheists and Anarchists believe that, whatever the question, positing intervention from some higher power is not a proper answer, and only leaves other things unexplained. They believe that, if an explanation is to be found, it must be found in reality, not in dogmas.

As I said, all of these are derived from the nature of authority. The ontological claims, on the other hand, are wildly different. Atheists argue against the concept of God on the basis of it not existing, while Anarchists do not argue that the State and capitalism themselves do not exist. The morality creator and enforcer, in this case, actually does exist. What is fictional in archism are the geo-political entities and concepts which are enforced by the capital-democratic system. In atheism, the concepts which are enforced by God (that is to say, the priesthood and the True Believers, by proxy) are very much real.

In both cases, though, the deep level of unreality is burned under layers of rhetoric and mental or physical violence. In the case of religion, mental violence from childhood onwards is generally sufficient to maintain belief, because religion mainly concerns itself with mental obedience (to God, to a dogma, to a set of principles). In the case of politics, physical violence is necessary, since politics concerns itself with physical issues (the actions and movements of people), although it is also concerned with mental obedience (propaganda, marketing, rhetoric, marginalizing unacceptable positions). All of these of course go back to the power wielded by authority and the hierarchies within which it exists.

If atheism and Anarchism are both mainly concerned with authority, then atheism must be a subset of Anarchism, but not vice-versa. Atheism deals specifically with the two forms of authority relevant to religion, while Anarchism deals with all forms of authority.

The economy is based on fraud.

AlterNet gives us a list of ten ways in which the American economy is built on fraud.

Big Pharma Fraud. Remember that scene early in Fight Club, when Edward Norton explained his job, when it was more profitable to let a car defect go and pay whatever lawsuit settlements come from the deaths, and when it’s better to recall the cars because the number of deaths will result in too many lawsuits? This is humanitarian do-gooder stuff compared to the savage real-world fraud-for-profit model that drives America’s drug companies. It’s really simple and it goes like this: the more fraud a drug company commits, so long as it’s off-the-scale fraud with the most horrible consequences for the victims, the drug company’s profits always outdo the criminal fines and lawsuits by factors of 20, 30, 100… It’s as simple as that.

BEST MAGICIAN!

The case for socialist intellectual ownership.

UPDATE: Stephan Kinsella has written yet another of his empty rebuttals, this time about this entry (calling it “the worst argument for IP ever,” which indicates that he apparently is either a horrible reader or that he thinks a system without property is a system of property). I already addressed the little amount of substance in what he wrote in my comment to it.

***

As I’ve discussed before, the case against IP from the libertarian side is predicated on the fact that IP is a particularly destructive and unjustified form of property. As a libsoc, I do not believe in property, therefore I reject IP on that basis also, although I do not think IP is particularly destructive or unjustified: all rights to property are destructive and unjustified.

But the other side of IP, the premise that intellectual work must be rewarded above and beyond labor, is rarely examined, much in the same way that we don’t examine usury. The questions that are invariably asked along that line are pragmatic in nature (i.e. does IP actually stimulate innovation and reward innovators?) instead of being ethical (i.e. is it just to stimulate innovation and reward innovators, and if so, how and how much?)

The two issues are linked. IP does not stimulate innovation and it does not reward innovators because it is founded on commodity fetishism; it is the owner of the idea itself, being an abstract piece of property, who is rewarded, not the individual who laboured to discover it (I do not mean to imply that there must only be one discoverer involved, but I am using the singular as a simplification). IP is a failure, not because it recognizes intellectual work, but because it is a form of property. This is why I propose the term IO (intellectual ownership).

My position on IO may seem to contradict my belief in a system of equal wages. I’ve said before that the justification for equal wages is that our production is only a tiny margin on everyone else’s production, and that therefore we are no more entitled to an unequal part of society’s production than everyone else. But this scenario assumes a fixed system where there is no innovation present. If person A invents a new manufacturing process, which is then used by person B, to the exclusion of anything else, to produce some commodity, person B owes more to person A for his production than he does to any other specific person. The same can be said for a publishing business regarding the authors whose work it publishes.

In the IO system, innovation or creative works are first registered in the same way than they are today. The differences start when we look at what this registration implies. In the IP system, holding a patent or a copyright means you hold an artificial monopoly over that property for a long period of time, consumers have to pay monopoly prices combined with a lack of choice, and innovation is blocked because other producers cannot use and improve upon the innovation.

In the IO system, everyone is encouraged to manufacture products which take advantage of the innovation. There is no restriction of the kind we see today. The only limitation is that the cost-price must be raised by a certain percentage, reflecting the added cost of the innovation itself. In the case of artistic works, this percentage might be up to 1%, but in the case of innovations, it would be a range something like 0.1%-0.01%, the specific percentage in each case depending on how significant the improvement is (the actual percentages are just my guess and are not meant to be realistic: if the real percentages are more like 5% or 10%, then the cost-price should be raised by 5% or 10% instead).

So this is a sort of automatic licensing system, but unlike licensing systems, any ideas not licensed can be used without any repercussions whatsoever. There is therefore a strong incentive for people to make their discoveries public instead of hiding them under non-disclosure contracts, especially since the inventor himself, in a system without usury, gets as much more money from other people selling products based on his innovations than if he had a monopoly imposed on it (assuming of course that in both cases supply would be equal: in fact, it is likely that the inventor would gain more from the former case).

In the IP system, which is based on commodity fetishism, the owner of the “intellectual property” is rewarded (generally some faceless corporation with the clout to sue anyone who steps on their toes). In IO, it is the individual who performed the labor of discovery who is rewarded, since it is this labor that is recognized as embodied in the innovation.

The IO system, therefore, does everything that the IP system is supposed to accomplish but does not actually accomplish: 1. reward inventors properly, 2. stimulate innovation, 3. encourage the sharing of information. On each point, we find that the IP system not only fails, but has effects which are contrary to the objective. The IO system, on the other hand, fulfills each of these points. Not only that, but it also brings with it the massive advantage that consumers no longer have to pay monopoly prices (which can be murderous if you are, say, a sick Ghanaian and the pill you need costs fifty US dollars because there are five patents on it) and suffer lack of choice in the name of protecting innovation. If you’re against IO and for IP, then you’re basically pro-monopoly prices and anti-poor.

It also puts an upper limit on the ever-expanding horizon of IP: obviously, if the inventor dies, the royalties have to end as well, since they are tied to him personally. But one would expect that a rational system would limit royalties farther than that. Ultimately, the time interval within which IO applies would have to be dependent on the time it takes for any given innovation to be integrated in the framework of production and become old hat, for example. I would not hazard to guess what a reasonable interval would be, and I assume it would depend on the kind of intellectual output put forward.

IO also makes the issue of “pirating” irrelevant, since pirated content is, most of the time, distributed at zero cost-price, and any percentage of zero is zero. Therefore “pirating” could never be a crime in any shape or form.

It also eliminates all concepts of making it illegal to play a song in public without paying fees, or any such nonsense. Playing a song in public involves no cost-prices, and therefore is not under the provision of IO. It does not matter that the “property” is being infringed, since IO recognizes no such property, only labor.