Memeverse

I’ve said it before, but let’s make if “official”.

I hereby declare my sovereignty from all governments, all nations and all laws. I am not a croatian. I am not european.

I am an inhabitant of the Planet Earth and this is its flag.

Mind you I can make my own flag if I want to. I can stand by multiple flags of my own making or my own choosing, but none of the national ones. None!

I wont even call myself a “citizen” because that might imply someone has to grant me “citizenship”. I live on Earth so I am an inhabitant, nothing more, nothing less. You could say that I live in Croatia and am therefore an inhabitant of croatia, but I’ll take that as meaning that you call this general area to be “croatia”, but borders don’t matter.

Do I have the right to make these kinds of proclamations? Well, do I own myself? Yes. If you believe otherwise, prove it!

Thank you.

In my last post about Freedomware I tried to define it without relying on the copyright law since I no longer believe in it. My conclusion was that Freedomware, for me, is essentially more about a particular kind of culture and mentality than it is about a given license and that the only equivalent to such a license that can exist in a free market is a contract with particular terms and conditions for use and distribution.

I further argued, especially in my discussion with Thomas in comments, that ultimately contracts which require of users not to copy the contracted software would fail in the market and be considered undesirable by both the users and developers. However I focused a little too much on how could some arbiters rule in favor of the one breaking the contract by copying because his breakage didn’t deprive the original developer of the copy. The thing is, I might be quite wrong about this as if you agree to a contract and yet break it, no matter how stupid the conditions were you’re responsible for signing up to them and should live up to them or terminate the contract by ceasing to use the product or service offered through it, even if that meant deleting a copy of the software you bought and making no backups.

However, even if we assume that all proprietary software contracts broken by the user (by something like an act of copying not authorized by the contract) are judged by the arbiter in favor of the developer and against the user, it doesn’t exactly change the likelihood of proprietary software contracts becoming undesirable. In fact, the more efficient developers are in suing the contractors that broke their contracts the more undesirable and less tolerant may customers be to accepting such contracts in the first place.

So basically, no matter how you turn this around, it seems to me that without the support of a coercive monopoly and its heinous regulation of the market, proprietary software would probably end up being rather unpopular compared to software offered under less restrictive contracts, most of which possibly being classifiable as Free Software (as in freedom), with the source code, right to copy, modify etc.

That said, I would now like to turn to the issue of morality as it relates to Free Software. Being a voluntaryist, the highest principle I uphold is the principle of non-initiation of force and the more I focus on that conditional the more tolerant I seem to become towards other people doing what I once perhaps considered immoral or unethical. Some would call this to be moral erosion, but they have to bear in mind that being a voluntaryist does not mean accepting non-initiation of force as your ONLY moral principle. It just means that whatever other moral principles you have, you shouldn’t give yourself the right to force it on other people.

You can write, campaign, try to influence people any way you can think of to accept your own moral principles as long as you don’t force them to, as long as it ultimately still remains their own free choice.

That said, an interesting question that pops up in my mind is; what else, aside from non-initiation of force, conditions the acceptance of a particular principle as a moral one? Let’s say someone is doing something you find disgusting, but he or she is not initiating force or fraud by doing it. You could still say that what he or she is doing is wrong thereby making a moral statement and implying that it is part of your own moral principles not to do that and not to condone other people doing that.

What is it that makes you consider this wrong though? Just the fact that you are disgusted by it? Often times this probably is the case. Merely the fact that something seems heinous and ugly to you makes you feel like it’s wrong. Sometimes, however, it may be that you believe proliferation of such acts will have adverse consequences to you and your society, that they will establish a path towards something much worse and so on.

But then we just get back to the old situation. If nobody is forcing you to participate what do you care? The “society” you are talking about isn’t “you”, an individual and you can’t control other people, just yourself. So all it comes back to is your mere disgust. You think an act that you find disgusting will lead to more people acting in a way you don’t like and then more etc. and wish to prevent this somehow, but the only reason you are doing so is because you are disgusted, because you don’t like what you see, not because there is some universal “wrong” in it. As I stated earlier, I don’t believe there is such a thing as morally wrong or right in the universe at large. These are the judgments human individuals assign to things and acts themselves.

What’s especially interesting about this, then, is that if the only thing that makes something wrong, aside of initiatory force is the fact you don’t like it yet your likes and dislikes tend to change over time, all other morals aside from the moral of non-initiation of force are totally relative and subjective and are NOT worth forcing people for. In other words, the moral of non-initiation of force and fraud completely overrides all others. When you realize this you might, like myself, find yourself in a situation in which you actually become more tolerant towards some things you found to be “immoral” before because, perhaps, the fact you don’t like it just doesn’t seem like a strong enough reason to sweat over, nor strong enough reason to waste your breath over.

This is how the “be and let be” mentality starts to settle in, the mentality of true tolerance.

Let’s go back to Freedomware and how this ties in to that. Richard Stallman believes and actively propagates the idea that developers who provide their software under the terms which restrict people from unlimited use, copying and modifying of it are doing something morally wrong. The first question I would ask to verify that claim is whether such developers initiate force or fraud?

1. Do developers of proprietary software force or fraud people into accepting their restrictive terms of use and distribution?

Generally, no! There are of course some exceptions and Microsoft is guilty of some of them (often using law because this is the only way they can “legitimately” force people). But most proprietary software developers probably don’t force anyone to accept their terms. They wont give you a copy, of course, but they wont force it upon you either. You might even get a copy of their software elsewhere for free (warez…) and most of them still wouldn’t actively go about pursuing you.

So in what way is offering software under restrictive terms unethical??

Well, that’s where I reach the crunching point. I don’t seem to have a very satisfactory answer. Universally speaking, nothing. It’s not initiation of force and nobody is being harmed. If someone accepts the license then (s)he is responsible for accepting the restrictions that come with it. So what makes someone, like Richard Stallman, believe that it is unethical or immoral is pretty much because he doesn’t like it, a feeling that he developed throughout his life’s experiences, when he felt like being pressured into non-cooperation by the trend of releasing software under restrictive terms.

This trend, however, wouldn’t have continued if people refused to accept such restrictive terms. However, it would also have quite a bit of difficulty continuing should have the market been free of government regulation. Just think of continuous extensions of the term and scope of copyright law and the “limited liability” blanket for big corporations (obviously, including Microsoft) or all the lobbying those corporations then successfully did to force even worse restrictions upon us. The state played a very significant role in fueling the trend of restrictive licensing. What I’m basically saying is that we probably wouldn’t have a proprietary software monopoly in 90s nor would some of us be so adamantly disgusted by proprietary software if state regulation didn’t help make restrictive terms THE standard contract under which software was distributed.

If it was a Free Market and restrictive contracts somehow gained such foothold then we would just be the “unfortunate” minority, but at least it’d be much easier for us to just do our GNU thing and be left alone, no laws to fight against which threaten the existence of even our nice GNU software itself (DMCA, software patents etc.).

So in essence the true problem was not the fact that many people wanted you to agree to certain restrictive terms before they give you the binary of it, because this is a choice every individual is free to make. The problem was that the governments, coercive monopolies, actually helped make such a model standard - they forcefully (how else) interfered with the natural developments in the market to artificially create a situation in which we are.

So what do people who don’t like such terms do about it? Earlier I expressed that I believe that whatever you do it shouldn’t include initiatory force or fraud. Richard Stallman responded with a license, turning copyright law’s default terms on their head: copyleft. Given the circumstances this probably was the smart thing to do. However, there is a problem.

It was the state, the government and their laws which created the bulk of the problem in the first place and now we are trying to solve it by using, again, the state, the government and its laws. We are “forcing back”. We are “regulating back”. We are spinning in circles. And what is the ultimate conclusion of this trend? What would happen in Free Software way of using copyright, regulating the market etc. took as much foothold as proprietary software has today? Take it from Richard Stallman’s mouth:

“Proprietary software should be illegal” — Richard Stallman

There you have it. Richard’s morality imposed on everyone else by force through law. People who for whatever reason want to release their software under more restrictive terms than Stallman would allow could be punished for it.

It’s just replacing one kind of regulation with another. Free Software may be better, but forcing it is not the way and that’s what Stallman wants to do.

The bottom line is this. Freedom is not “be free or I’ll rob you or throw you in jail”. Freedom is not “freedom or else”. Freedom can only exist without force. You therefore CANNOT force freedom.

Therefore, I would rather live in a free market where proprietary software has 90% market share than in a state where Free Software is enforced by law.

Of course, I extremely doubt that proprietary software would ever win in the free market. The point is, I would have exactly the same amount of freedom whether proprietary software has most or least market share, if it was a free market. Compare that to our “regulated market” with all the laws actually favoring proprietary software and threatening the existence of Free Software.

Another point I want to make, based on all this, is that someone using proprietary software is a choice everyone has a right to, just as the choice to use Free Software. This whole “100% Free Software or you’re helping evil” mantra is largely missing the point. You wont be free if you put exclusively Free Software on your computer. You will be free once you become aware of the fact that only you can control your own life and nobody else and that you have no right to control anybody elses life. By realizing this you would become a voluntaryist and you would free your mind.

That’s where freedom is, not in how many which licenses or contracts you willfully accepted, but in being aware of your personal power enough to make what you think and feel is the right decision in any moment, yes even if that decision sometimes includes proprietary software.

Thank you

Someone might think that I think too much and do too little and might even be right about that. Then again I shouldn’t care too much about what “someone” thinks, albeit how much will I care depends on who that someone is and how much value does he or she represents in my life (or how much does he or she mean to me). But I’m over-thinking it again perhaps.

It is true though that I have a sort of a compulsion to get clean on certain topics before I proceed with some others. The ultimate of this, one which I easily gravitate towards, is to get clean on everything - everything that anyhow relates to my life - to just think it all through, decide on a conclusion and then draw my moves from there.

This thinking things through, especially if lack of concentration creeps in, can take a while. I feel, however, that when I blog about one of those topics it accelerates the process. Writing seems to boost thinking and publishing the final result for whomever is reading, even if it’s nobody, somehow seems to give me a psychological seal of completeness, making it easier to move on with something new. It’s like making a commitment saying this is what I think now and that’s done, it’s out.. and now I can begin exploring further.

When I say “everything” here I mean everything that should ever be relevant to me and my life. Everything includes the reality outside of me and the reality of me. The outside reality includes everything that I ever encountered in my life, everything that I am encountering right now and everything that I will encounter in the future. Reality of me includes everything that I was, everything that I am and everything that I want to be, with an emphasis on what I am because this is where the “game” starts. This is the perspective from which I am looking.

What I learned so far about reality of everything:

1. Everything in reality, including myself, is in fact more than anything a process. As time passes there is a process going on that keeps moleculs together which in turn form materials and everything else, including us.

2. These processes are always actions and reactions. It doesn’t take long to conclude that my life is a process as well and that every act I undertake will have an inescapable reaction, a consequence.

3. Everything is consisted of fundamentals, including the fundamentals themselves (fundamentals of fundamentals). Subatomic particles make up an atom which make up moleculs which make up materials which make up objects etc. The way this works is by the rule of universal commonalities (yes I just made that term up). If something is common to everything then it is considered a fundamental. If every physical thing is consisted of atoms and moleculs then they are fundamental to all physical things. If a certain idea is common to all concepts and philosophies observed then those philosophies have that as their fundamental idea. And so on.

4. I own myself and am the dictator of my life. I get to decide on every single next move that I can possibly make consciously. I control my actions totally.

5. The more conscious I am about the reality of me and reality outside of me the more control I will have over my life. The more I truly know myself and the reality outside of myself the better equipped I am to make the right judgments of consequences I expect of certain actions, before I undertake them.

6. As perfect as life can get is when you arrange all your actions in exactly such way that will bring exactly the consequences you desire, and when you have a high (near to 100%) rate of correct predictions of consequences. You don’t need to be psychic for this, just very very aware of the processes that are going on around everything that relates to every act you are making. If you have all the facts you just have to connect the dots to see what should a particular action lead you to.

7. Emotions are a signal making me know whether I am on the right track or not, unless misinterpreted (which is another skill to master). Basically, emotions can tell me if I really love what I’m currently doing and if I really like the consequences that I earned by my actions. I have to have these signals in order to be able to truly guide my life in the direction I want to - towards being more wealthy, more positively influential and more happy.

Now… it’s easier said than done.

Knowing self is a pretty advanced skill. I’m not sure what’s harder, getting to know oneself or getting to know the reality of everything around oneself.

At least the journey doesn’t ever have to stop. I should make it into a habit to research, read and then explore more regularly.

Cheers

The reason is quite simple really. The more capable you are to think independently and cognitively the less susceptible you will be to being controlled. If you can’t think for yourself then anyone can fool you and anyone can make you believe anything at any time. I can only feel sorry for you at that point, but no, this time I will not blame propaganda or the person who is trying to convince you of something.

I will blame you.

Propaganda is, quite simply, a tool. It can be used to convey any message or idea, whether I think it’s good or bad. The only thing that differentiates it from an educational film is that aside from your reasoning capabilities it also appeals to your emotions which can in many cases actually be a good thing. Involving emotion into the matter is what makes people passionate and energized about something. It is also a way to get people who usually don’t care about a particular thing to start caring.

Propaganda is therefore like technology. You can’t blame it, you can’t ever blame a “thing” anyway. You can only blame a human being, the producer of a propaganda movie if you believe that the idea he is conveying is the wrong one or the viewer of propaganda for being too willing to accept what is being conveyed without thinking independently about it and researching the facts.

Besides, there is no such thing as an universally wrong or an universally right idea. There is only what is real and what is not. If you have an idea which makes you act in a particular way, reality will always kick in with the consequences of your action. If you dislike the consequences then you might judge your idea as a wrong one. If the consequences are good then you might be on the right track. And the only one who can decide if the consequences are good or bad is you, with consideration to what your desires and goals actually are.

The problem with people in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China is not so much propaganda as much as the willingness of people to accept its message almost without questioning. It is ignorance and intellectual laziness. If Hitler’s propaganda was to convey the ideas of individualism, individual sovereignty, freedom, rights to life, liberty and property and people blindly accepted it, I would be willing to bet that they would all be better off because such propaganda would have the same exact message I am trying to convey with many of my posts: think for yourself.

And that would be an example of propaganda which, EVEN when accepted blindly, actually created what can by most people probably considered a good outcome, because everyone is an individual, alive and to a point selfish - and everyone wants to be free of force.

Ideally, of course, they would accept such propaganda only after they have thoroughly questioned it which is excellent because then those who do accept and adopt the idea will do so not only on basis of an emotional appeal, but on the basis of reason, making their enlightenment all the more profound.

In other words, the ideal way to tackle your exposure to propaganda is with the prioritize reason over passion mentality. This doesn’t mean that the emotional appeal shouldn’t entice you to explore the idea further. I mean, if it works for you then go for it! It just means that the emotional trigger should be secondary. It got you intrigued, it got you excited.. to stop at that and turn yourself into an immediate true believer now would be a mistake though. You still need to think it through, do some research to see if the trigger of reason would switch to green for the newly discovered idea too.

Propaganda is especially useful for small grassroots movements who are having trouble convincing people to even give them a chance, to at least try and hear them out. So if making an emotional appeal can get people to listen who can blame them for trying it? They aren’t forcing you to believe anything after all and they aren’t the ones who can brainwash your mind if you don’t let it. You can proclaim them as “evil” if you end up disliking the idea they conveyed (though in my opinion that’d be a foolish proclamation as I don’t believe anyone is inherently evil) or you can praise them for “opening your eyes”, but in both cases it is you who is responsible for what you end up believing in and the consequences of actions you undertake in pursuit of such beliefs, and nobody else!

It is interesting how both The Borg and The Dominion, two of the greatest evil adversaries in Star Trek are portrayed to desire one thing above all else: order. The Borg assimilate everything they find valuable to their collective, valuable according to their own view of order. Everything then becomes a part of a bigger whole and without a shred of individualism. Just as it was once said in Hitler’s Germany; Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler. The same can be literally said for The Borg and The Borg queen. Perfection that Borg so adamantly pursues is in fact the most extreme form of totalitarianism possible.

The Dominion, on the other hand, was founded by a race of shapeshifters who were once exploring the galaxy and finding many “solids” (non shapeshifting beings) to be quite fearful and thereby violent to them (or so they believe). Shapeshifters then begun perceiving all “solids” as a threat and that became a part of their own order of things. Instead of being the hunted now they are the hunters. Instead of being controlled now they are in control. The Dominion is portrayed to be a powerful force in the gamma quadrant, of course, with a job of establishing order upon chaos.

Now while these are fictions, they do come from the creative minds of certain human individuals and they do therefore reflect particular characteristics of the reality as we know it, a reality in which we ourselves have repeatedly established governments in order to do exactly the same thing that these fictive organizations were portrayed to exist for: establish order upon chaos.

The concept of government exists as part of an ideology that can be summed up as a “Religion of Order”. This “religion” consists of these three core beliefs:

1. A certain limited set of beliefs constitutes and defines “order”. Everything else is the opposite; chaos.

This is essentially a perpetual self administered delusion, that things we currently believe to be true are the only things that really are true absolutely, that things we currently believe are right are the only things that could ever be right, that things that do not conform to our current set of beliefs belong to the realm of chaos.

This is a result of a fundamentally closed minded, self defeating and self limiting idea which lives, like a virus, in the minds of the masses on this planet.

2. All that does not conform to this order (defined by the above set of beliefs) is wrong or evil.

This merely follows from the limited view of reality above. In addition to branding things that don’t conform as “chaos” we introduce a strong moral judgment of the non-conforming as absolutely and uncompromisingly wrong, evil, thereby worth fighting against by any means necessary.

3. Force is justified against all such evil

What else to expect from such a limited yet absolutist view? If force and violence is what it takes to purity everything that belongs to “chaos” so be it. If you don’t conform to “the order” you must be punished. This is why followers of The Religion of Order tend to eventually one way or another persecute everyone who lives in defiance or non-conformity to the order they designated as such.

I could say that all governments are guilty of being a part of this religion, but governments are nothing but just people who assumed the roles that this religion naturally provisions for; essentially the role of preaching the order (law), teaching conformity (public education and propaganda) and doing enforcement (force, violence). Governments would be meaningless without the people who give them their support and they give them their support exactly because they too believe in this religion of order - they actually agree that order, conformity and force are necessary and good and are usually utterly ignorant of the flaw inherent in this philosophy.

The flaw is that it is ultimately self defeating. It deprives from the natural tendencies and potential of the most basic unit of every human “order”: the human individual. This is how it crumbles. Sooner or later you find that believing in this religion only got you shafted, unless you were lucky, devious or foolishly hotheaded enough to actually be a successful power grubbing politician or managed to combine your ingenuity with political protectionism to build a corporate empire. But we know those people are in a minority, or else why would we speak of a divide between rich and poor, right?

So why do the rest of us, the majority who repeatedly gets shafted by this religion, still believe in it? Why do we still follow it? Why do we feed its power? I can only think of two basic reasons: ignorance or fear.

The first is probably most prevalent. As long as you conform, for instance not break any laws no matter how stupid some of them seemed, you don’t have anything to be afraid of, or at least that’s what you believe. But that’s where the story ends. You live your life within those confines and think of no better way. Your ignorance is bliss, until the almost inevitable consequences of such mind imprisoning mentality hit you - and they almost always do.

The second is fear. Even if you are a bit more inquisitive and less ignorant and find that there is a lot things wrong about “the system”, the order of things, you fear the very ideas that could set your mind free as “dangerous ideas”. You fear that if you refuse to conform one way or another you will end up punished in some way by the ignorant followers of the order.

The trouble is, we’re so deep into this problem that it indeed is hard to blame an individual for feeling either of the above two ways. This religion of order is like a pan religion whose ideas managed to pull through many other religions as well as among the supposedly non-religious people. Order, Conformism and Force. Many christians believe it. Many muslims believe it. Many atheists believe it. Too many believe it for too long. The idea has one way or another been perpetuated throughout centuries.

Yet, if we get stuck in this perpetual ignorance or fear, waiting for “better times” we will only see history repeat itself, because that is what happens when we have this single core set of beliefs governing billions of people on Earth for such an indefinite amount of time. Times change and technology changes yet the fundamental belief remains, the belief that is the very cause of “history repeating itself”. As various “orders” collide we have power struggles, wars, fascism, economic collapses etc. It will never be truly any different if we never finally wake up to the reality of what is behind all this:

The Religion of Order

It created more chaos than “chaos” itself could. When are you gonna wake up to that reality?

Stefan Molyneux has so nicely expressed what is at heart of the upcoming site, DoublePlusHuman.com. Be big, be human. Here is a video with his encouraging speech.

Here is a download link, thanks to KeepVid.com.

Enjoy.

I am getting to the bottom of why anarcho-capitalism can work. Let’s start by defining “nature”, “laws of nature” and “human nature”.

Nature is everything in the universe which is not by human (non-artificial, existence of which is independent and completely agnostic to humans and their conditions and affairs).

Laws of nature are all processes and properties which are beyond human control and which no human can escape.

Human nature are therefore all processes and properties applicable to humans which are beyond their control and escape.

Since anarcho-capitalism is essentially a proposed system of human interaction (a “social system”) the last definition, “human nature”, is most relevant here. Some of the fundamental properties and processes which fit the above definition are the following:

1. Humans are living, self-aware beings capable of thinking, choosing and acting. Since this is their nature they are entitled to self-ownership, liberty and property as the product of their actions.

2. A human being, in any given moment, always acts in pursuit of to him or her maximum value.

3. A human being sees destruction of his or her value as immoral or “wrong” and construction of the same as moral or “right”.

4. What one human sees as a value can differ from what another human sees.

So in summary, all humans live, think, choose and act in pursuit of what is most valuable to them at any given moment while considering the destruction of the same as morally wrong, but what is most valuable differs from person to person.

One thing that we learn from nature as we understand it so far is that it always pursues the path of least resistance. To a particular human, what is most valuable is usually most motivating. Therefore pursuit of this value is also going to be the “easiest” thing to do, the most cost-effective thing to do. It may not seem so at first because most of us tend to have a limited perception of “value”. We therefore say that sometimes pursuing a moral path is harder and will encounter more resistance.

However, if one is set “against the odds” yet still proceeds this just means that proceeding is more valuable to him or her than giving up or conversely that not proceeding would encounter more mental resistance than proceeding. External obstacles are already taken into the value equation of this individual and deemed less resisting than the mental resistance he would encounter should he proceed otherwise or more worth than the mental reward he would feel should he proceed otherwise.

One of the most relevant principles involved with anarcho-capitalism is non-coercion. What is coercion? It is the process by which individual A attempts to affect the value judgment of individual B by the threat of force, in order to induce an action (s)he desires an individual B to take. “Force” here is defined as destruction of something individual B finds valuable, from his life to his property.

Coercion will fail if individual B finds mental reward of resisting the aggressor to be higher than the mental reward of giving in to the aggressor. Coercion, unsurprisingly, usually succeeds since avoiding harm or termination to life is usually found more mentally rewarding than getting killed or harmed. However, this is a choice between value destruction and value destruction, two wrongs - two evils of which individual B has to choose one which he deems lesser. If coercion fails anything of value to individual B that was threatened by the aggressor, from life to property, may be destroyed. If coercion succeeds, it is still individual B’s freedom which was destroyed.

And by nature of existing every individual values his freedom, to the extent to which he is aware of being entitled to it.

Anarcho-capitalism is fundamentally about establishing a laissez faire free market of individual humans. This market is self-regulating because it depends on the value pursuits of each individual in it. And since everyone has different values, but everyone seeks to maximize them, trade of values usually occurs. It is devoid of coercion because coercion means destruction of liberty, which is of value to every individual. When one individual in a free market exercises coercion (s)he is acting against the freedom value of an individual and therefore against the fundamental value of the market to which this individual belongs to, BUT also against the freedom of his/her own. This is because at that point the harmed individual, or its family, will be entitled to seek the aggressor and force him to pay the reparations. This is the only case in which force is not deemed destructive, because it merely restores the value destruction of an individual to which the force was initiated.

What this means is that coercion in a free market has a value price which involves not only the reparations that the aggressor is potentially going to be forced to pay, but the loss of freedom as well, something valuable to every individual. Since all humans act in pursuit of maximum value, coercion will be employed only when this is the method by which an individual believes he will achieve maximum value (which can be of both moral and physical kind). Given the abundance of other methods available in a market of individuals who trade in pursuit of value, this option is very likely to be unpopular, deemed too expensive, too much of a hassle, too risky or simply too immoral.

In addition, considering that anarcho-capitalists wont succeed in building such a free market without convincing enough people to believe that coercion is immoral (because this is the only way they can stop believing in the justifiability of government) it follows that if a laissez faire free market is established it will be consisted of people who largely find non-coercion to be immoral and furthermore risky, expensive and unpopular. Compared with the fact that coercion in a current government-led society is a norm rather than an act unlikely to happen, free market is degrees of magnitude more desirable to anyone who cares about pursuing the maximum of his values - hence every human.

Free Market is the path of least resistance *because* it is a path with least coercion.

And the only way it could not be the path of least resistance is if people were not acting in pursuit of maximum value - which is impossible - because acting this way is human nature - inescapable.

In summary, there is a connection between human nature and the moral of non-coercion in that by the virtue of being what they are humans are more likely to find the path of non-coercion to be the path of least resistance than any other method of pursuing the maximum of value.

This may seem to be a merely philosophical and theoretical statement, but it relies on certain fundamental testable axioms which if proven true prove the statement above. Those axioms are the presented definition of nature, natural laws, the three descriptions of processes and properties inherent in human nature and the link between coercion and destruction of value.

There is so much stuff to read, both pro and against my current worldview and there is so much to evaluate based on this worldview from my business activities to my advocacy. In addition, there are all these still not entirely honed out and contextualized concepts and ideas floating around, such as those presented here for example.

So I’m compelled to evaluate the foundational process by which I should be addressing these issues, the process of thinking, from which all else follows. I think that for a being that is alive, self-aware, intelligent and capable of thinking and deciding everything in the universe starts with “him” or “her” or “me” - an individual. Only through your own eyes can you begin to see, or through your own ears to hear. Only through your own senses can you start sensing the reality around you and only through your own thinking can you process this information. There is no other computer more important than your own mind. We must think for ourselves. I must think for myself. And if conclusions I reach disagree with the beliefs of the majority, that should be of no consequence to my discovery. A scientist with a new discovery will not deny his discovery simply because he is the only one in the world who made it.

So how do we discover? First, you sense, receiving the information from the reality around you. It may come in the form of light, sound, smell, taste and skin sensations. This includes everything, from what we simply feel to what we read (articulated expressions of reality which are fed into our mind). So what is next, once all this raw information comes into our mind what happens? I’d rather say what *should* happen.

So this is the three step process of thinking:

1. Processing new information: Raw information received, mixed with our personality, quickly starts constituting ideas and concepts. Arranging these ideas and concepts into a contextual pattern of some sort results in a paradigm. How do we do this in the most beneficial way?

The rule NO 1: Adopt as truth only those ideas and concepts which are devoid of logical fallacies and contradictions even after you thoroughly tested them by a scientific process.

2. Acting, adapting your circumstances to new ideas and concepts: Those ideas and concepts which you adopted, even perhaps a whole new paradigm, may demand that you rearrange your life to fit. How do we do this?

Rule NO2: Realistically evaluate your real life circumstances and develop a process by which you will adapt them to your new ideas, concepts or paradigm. You’ll likely fail if you just try to force the new way of living upon the old one. There must be a process of adaptation.

3. Consistently and habitually questioning ourselves: There is always a chance that the ideas and concepts we adopted, no matter with how much scrutiny have we initially tested them, contain some logical inconsistencies and contradictions. It may simply happen that we discover something new that challenges the old conceptions. This is why questioning even our current truths is important and should be developed into a habit. How we do that?

Rule NO3: Ask the question “why” all the time in order to maintain a consistently high level of self-awareness. For all significant activities that you undertake ask yourself why are you doing them. Ask yourself why do you believe what you believe? Keep your mind “on its toes”. This way you can hope to avoid the “wrong ideas that always seem right and are never questioned” and therefore allow yourself to evolve efficiently.

I think that successfully adopting this process of thinking can tremendously help increase your chances of success, gaining wealth and influencing positive world change. I did not yet entirely adopted this process but I am trying. It is still something that I was able to formulate only so recently and therefore I still have lots of practicing to do.

But I think that once I do adopt this process, I will feel like nothing can stand in my way, because when you think in a way that increases awareness every problem encountered may already call solutions forming within your mind, as if it was automatic. When you always ask “why” you make all of the circumstances of your life a part of consciousness rather than subconsciousness therefore having so many more “tools” to work with once you encounter a problem that needs fixing.

Nothing can stop a free mind that thinks. Nothing.

My mind + internet + pursuit of freedom + pursuit of personal wealth and happiness = me.

Being so tied to internet, with my work life, my social life, my pursuits I could feel limited. However, on the other hand the internet as the network of all human knowledge is also the network of all ideas and a perfect medium of idea exchange and propagation. I am a node and I am a sucker for ideas. And ideas are powerful. How much of that power will I be able to personally extract depends on how efficient my processing skills are - thinking.

Thinking is being. Thinking is what creates new opportunities for wealth, material, intellectual and spiritual. As beings that think we are an embodiment of ideas. The sooner an individual realizes this the sooner will its potential to grow more powerful.

The more I realize how important it is to think of myself as an individual the more capable I become at critically observing that which I am, by some default, supposed to belong or adhere to. I think therefore I am. I am therefore I am free. Nothing and nobody can take that away. Freedom comes from a free mind, not from the external reality. If you are a slave, yet your mind is free, you are free. If you are free yet your mind is not, you are a slave. And sooner or later, reality as it relates to your freedom will reflect the state of your mind.

Therefore my destiny is becoming clearer and clearer. It is to free my mind and then help others free theirs. This will be a process of creating value by helping others be capable of creating value so that they too can help others create more value - until this world as a whole is free.

It is not enough to have an open mind. A Free Mind is the real objective. Free as in freedom.

A video I just found very nicely and clearly explains the philosophy of Liberty that I now fully believe in.