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Philanthropy New Focus In Barry Kaye’s Life

Sunday, July 24th, 2011

Throughout his adult life, Barry Kaye explored ways to make a difference in people’s lives. He began as a radio and television personality, then entered the life insurance field. After becoming a very successful life insurance agent Barry Kaye spent many years as a successful author and speaker. At each stage of his life he sought to help people better their lives. Now that he is retired, he spends his time giving back by pursuing and supporting philanthropic activities.

Personal Meaning Important to Barry Kaye When Supporting Charities

When Barry Kaye chooses a charity to support, he first considers organizations that are personally meaningful to him. Groups that provide financial support to those in need or those that work towards the betterment of mankind top the list. The Diabetes Research Institute Foundation is one such organization. Barry Kaye and his wife, Carole, are ardent supporters of the organization and have hosted receptions in their Florida home.

Education is another field close to Barry Kaye’s heart. He has served on the board of Ben Gurion University in Israel and donated over $5 million to Florida Atlantic University, making him the third largest donor in the history of the university.

This is a guest post brought to you by Barry Kaye.

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No Loyalty

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

A lot of time has passed since I last blogged here, and a lot has happened since, but this post is not about that, and it would probably be somewhat pointless trying to bring my readers up to speed considering that I barely even have readers at this point. This will change, but in the mean time I just want to put these thoughts out there.

If I’ve learned anything in life, including the past few years and months it is that the only thing or person one needs to be loyal to is the self. Whatever so called “loyalty” is exercised towards other persons it is only as a result of, not in contradiction to, loyalty to the self. If you are loyal to someone else without being loyal to yourself you are just depersonalizing yourself. Not only is this ultimately self-destructive, it is actually dishonest. If your loyalty to others doesn’t come from the core of what you are as a person then you’re just pretending.

An interesting thing about being loyal to nobody, but yourself is that it is a great way to motivate yourself to try and accomplish things. Say you have a job in which you have to do certain things you don’t quite like doing or aren’t particularly passionate about. If you keep thinking about the job as something you just have to do for someone else in order to earn a paycheck, it probably wouldn’t make you feel very good. You’re still essentially stuck being someone elses servant in exchange for survival.

But there’s a different way of looking at it. You could think of the job you do as something you do for yourself, not for your boss. Instead of thinking of your boss as an authority, you can think of him or her as someone you are using to get what you want. Suddenly the center of gravity is yourself, as it should be, because only you can be truly in control of your life. You can then go further with this and devise an entire plot, a life’s plan, for what you want to accomplish in life and how does that job help you do that. You are no longer a servant, but the master. You are no longer helpless, but powerful. You are no longer a passenger. You are in the driver’s seat.

There are other examples. Take for instance something called “brand loyalty” which often goes so far as to have people fight each other verbally over which brand is better (Mac vs. PC, PS3 vs. Xbox vs. Wii etc.). It shouldn’t be hard to step back a little and see just how stupid this is. Here you are wasting your time and energy promoting someone elses product, someone elses vision, doing someone elses bidding. If you had a brand of your own every other brand you associate yourself with, every tool is there in service of propping up your own brand.

No matter in which situation you find yourself in life, you are the boss. There are only two things in existence as far as you are concerned: you and the universe with everything in it that you care about. The universe is yours to mold with as much available power as you’ve got.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should manipulate each other into submission, try to make each other servants. Everyone should be the boss, and if this sounds unsustainable, think about honesty again, because that’s all it comes back to. A person who is not the boss of his or her own life is in conflict with the self, and that’s dishonesty. It’s denying something that makes you who you are. If you are not right with yourself how will you be right with others? Your relationships will be based upon a fake or half image of who you are, not on who you really are.

Everyone being the boss doesn’t mean nobody ever doing anything for anyone, even for free. It just means that when you do something for someone you do it because you truly want to, because it serves your interests too, not because you think you have to. Conversely, when someone does something for you, you will likely feel a lot better if he or she did it because she really wanted to instead because she thinks she has to! See how this works!

So have no loyalty. Ditch servitude in absolutely all facets of your life. Dream up what you want to accomplish and go for it no matter what.

I know I’m trying to, there’s just no other way.

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Updates and Memeverse Media consolidation

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Time flies and it’s been a while of it since the last Memeverse update. Even though it may sometimes seem like it I almost never sit idle. And even if I’m sitting idle chances are my mind is racing… I think too much, but I don’t act as much on my thoughts – yet.

Notable things I did do since last time was the following:

I’m still in a pretty bad financial shape though, just barely covering the costs. I guess I’m not much of a business person yet (too much thinking, too little acting like I said), but I’m getting there and I’m far from giving up. In fact the shiniest things are yet to come and this is what I wanna dedicate the rest of my post.

I was for a long while on and off pretty obsessed with just getting things right with regards to my attitude towards work, life and success. Even after being fairly confident I properly answered the question “what I love to do” over this year alone I’ve revisited it again at least twice always coming roughly to the same answer, but perhaps expressed a little differently. Lately I went and rounded it all up with other tough questions like “what my purpose is” and “what I want to be” after reading excellent stuff from Jonathan Mead and this little book called Curly’s Law. Part of the reason why I revisited those questions is the big issue I have with typical advice on focus as means to success. Somehow “do one thing” never ever could sit well with me, at least if it means what it seems to mean on its face.

I couldn’t drop my other projects. I tried for a while to make DoublePlusHuman.com my “One Thing” and focus primarily if not ONLY on it and while it is most resonant with what I want to accomplish I feel technology in general and Linux specifically and even music are too big parts of my interests, of who I am, to just let go. Focusing on “One Thing” among them felt like peeling away a part of myself. How can I succeed the right way if I have to cut out a part of myself to do it? Something’s fishy about that. Besides, I wrote myself: “If it doesn’t feel natural don’t force it” and I believe that.

Jonathan Mead seems to agree with that kind of philosophy. A lot of what he writes resonates quite deeply with the way I think. His slogan is “live on your own terms”. Imagine that. He wrote an article which was of special interest to me: ADD Is Your Friend or Why Distractions Are The Key To Your Success. Albeit he doesn’t necessarily depart from the “focus on one thing” advice he does very much acknowledge the need to be a little distracted and allow yourself to pursue other things. Then in the comments came a guy who linked to Curly’s Law, a little book I mentioned before, which lays out an idea which in some form I’ve already reached in my thinking, but really needed someone else to confirm as something that makes sense.

The idea is that “One Thing” doesn’t have to mean “One Project” or “One Activity”. What IS the “thing”? It could merely be one thing that is in common to everything you’re interested in and everything you love to do. Find that one commonality and even when you do multiple things (projects, activities), you’ll still be focusing on one thing plus you’ll know how to predict when a particular project or activity wont fulfill you too long. If it doesn’t have that “thing” (thang?) of yours.. it probably wont last. And I was already at a point where all the right puzzles were with me.. when this confirmation came I think it pretty much clicked or is starting to click. I know my one thing.

My one thing is what I already made up a word for: DoublePlusHuman. I can literally speak for hours about what we should be and since the human world is built of human individuals what the world should be as a result. I ultimately managed to define DoublePlusHuman as an individual who is free of all self-contradiction, coercion and superstition. Promotion of, becoming of and building a world of DoublePlusHuman is what my purpose in life is and this is merely an upgrade of everything I ever thought my purpose was before (like being a socially aware entrepreneur). What I want to become is a successful, personally powerful entrepreneur that can influence individuals and thus the world towards that, DoublePlusHuman vision.

Interestingly, Libervis.com and Nuxified.org, my other main projects (and in relation to Nuxified even the possibly upcoming LinuxNN.com) all fit this vision because technology fits it. Since DoublePlusHuman is about getting rid of self-contradiction it is about getting rid of self-sacrifice (what people commonly call a sacrifice isn’t always a sacrifice if you did it of your own values) and so called “selflessness”. Instead a DoublePlusHuman will without guilt admit to his or her nature as a being that wishes to flourish and grow, to achieve his or her dreams no matter how wild. Technology is just something we create in pursuit of many of such dreams. It is the extension of who we are and a direct effect of our continued evolution.

DoublePlusHumans without technology aren’t DoublePlusHumans. Luddites might disagree with me, but maybe not once they understand how exactly I view technology. People who fear technology are people who’ve been burned by its negative uses. I promote positive uses as the outcome of being DoublePlusHuman – uses of technology which are not self-contradictory, but self-fulfilling, not coercive upon yourself and others, but empowering of yourself and others and not in pursuit of superstition based causes (like flying airplanes, a great example of technology, against people of a different religion). Luddites, fear not technology. Fear the human beings who suffer from a severe infection of bad memes that put them at war with themselves and others.

This purpose is the ultimate purpose of nearly everything I do online or everything I do period. And these activities and projects is what I branded as “Memeverse Media”. It’s good to put a name on it because it’s like putting a dot at the end of a sentence, a variable that refers to something real and meaningful. I am me and Memeverse Media is what I do. What exactly is it?

It’s a conglomeration of projects and activities meant to promote the memes of DoublePlusHumans through writing, multimedia production and everything that underpins and feeds such efforts. I will be writing about it. I’ll make music and videos in the name of these ideas. I will be creating financially profitable projects to pay for its expansion. I eventually want to get to the point where Memeverse Media will spawn whole drama and science fiction movies that inspire people to think in this way and share this vision and its pursuit with me.

The ultimate outcome I hope for is that it will become big enough to not only serve as a way of promoting these ideas and such a vision of the world, but in practical terms build it. This is partly why I’ve already registered SpaceStead.com which will be in the relatively near future home a blog and a community about spacesteading, a natural future outcome of seasteading. Just in case we cannot free this world from self-defeating attitudes, we will plan to venture into space, build our homes there.

I want to be a part of such a project one day.

But back to the present.. the next thing up is further consolidation of Memeverse Media. I need to finish the upgrade and redesign of Nuxified.org (which was blocked by a severe technical issue I couldn’t resolve yet) so that it can be brought to the fold in new light, with a new slogan and a revitalized focus. These three projects will be the focal point, but I will also be trying to produce additional material, such as an ebook and eventually a membership site that I will charge for which are likely to be a part of DoublePlusHuman.com. I will also be making music and then music videos that promote the DoublePlusHuman vision, specific sites and Memeverse Media. I might also start writing science fiction which might provide the basis for future movies.

I will also be engaged part of the time in what I call “site flipping”, that is, letting myself experiment with various interesting project ideas and see if I can make them either financially or memetically complement the Memeverse Media purpose and otherwise “flip them” (sell them to a better owner) which can generate a little bit of extra cashflow while essentially serving as a Research & Development portion of my activities.

All in all, I want to inspire you, motivate you, make you shake with excitement of possibilities that exist for the future if we should only adopt the right memeverse in our minds.

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New articles on Libervis.com and DoublePlusHuman.com

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Yesterday I finished writing a follow up to my last article against “intellectual property” (“Intellectual Property” a Violation of Real Property) in an attempt to clarify some things and answer some objections brought about in discussions of the last article. You can read it here: Implications of rejecting “intellectual property”.

This time I have not submit it to LXer.com where most of the objections originated. I do not wish to participate on that site anymore because of what I believe is the intellectually smothering culture that tends to develop there partly as a result of intellectual dishonesty of certain incumbents and partly due to a flawed and problematic “terms of use” policy which bans political and religious discussion in a one-liner failing to clearly define the boundaries of what they are. Thus some people use this condition in terms of service whenever they cannot properly address the arguments that don’t go in their favor. They arbitrarily make their own definition of “political discussion” (even when it contradicts to what they themselves express elsewhere) and claim a “TOS violation” that would have the discussion locked or deleted.

This is BS and I will not stand for it. In fact, this sort of thing may just well see the rise of a competing service.

I’ve written two other articles on unrelated topics on my new site, DoublePlusHuman.com:

* Justice is not about vengeance, punishment or obedience and

* Your children ARE DoublePlusHuman

I was less analytical in them than I usually am, but then again being too analytical can sometimes be a pretty dry and long read. So I think it might be a good idea to sometimes just let out some opinions and some basic argumentation behind them in between the more analytical pieces.

When writing the last one about children, I became fairly emotional by the end. This is the sort of thing which really strikes the note in two ways at the same time, personal and in general pertaining to the state of the world as it is. I really think a lot rests in how we treat our children and what kinds of personal relationships, especially in family, do we foster.

That’s that for this update.

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About the controversial Modern Warfare 2 “No Russian” scene

Friday, November 13th, 2009

This morning I checked out an interesting thread on Freedomain Radio forums and followed a link to video showing “Call of duty Modern Warfare 2 Terrorist mission” (NSFW, pretty stomach turning material). I was shocked. It was enough to inspire some thinking and searching for more info about the scene and as it turned out it was already causing quite a bit of controversy.

Since the topic seems fitting for the purpose of Libervis.com I thought it would be a good idea to turn some of these thoughts into an article. Here is it: “Modern Warfare 2 jolts the player awake with a question: what kind of a world is this?”

It’s basically a commentary on the “No Russian” scene from the newly released “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ and some speculative exploration of implications of this kind of entertainment with regards to our culture.

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Two new Libervis articles.

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

After nearly a year of pause (at least in terms of new articles as I’ve still been publishing some references/links), I’ve published two new articles on Libervis.com. This follows after a redesign and a revision that was done recently which is meant to revive this long standing project as one of the key components in my web publishing “agenda”.

Here are the new articles:

1. How phishing scams show the need to evolve with technology

2. “Intellectual Property” a Violation of Real Property

The first reflects one of the basic issues that the site’s content is and will be tackling, which is the issue of our mental, cultural and social preparedness for the power of new technologies. Since it gives power to its user which can be both negative and positive technology changes the potential of certain mental, cultural and social norms to affect the society.

Second article is more philosophical, but mainly pertains to the issue we’ve been addressing since the founding of Libervis.com, which is the issue of proprietary software and Free Software and the currently believed paradigm that copyright law operates on. Software is a type of technology whereas copyright law and this “intellectual property” paradigm reflects some social and cultural norms. This has consequences some of which have been outlined in that article.

Libervis.com will continue to actively be used to address issues all across the spectrum that lies between society and culture as we know it and the technology that we use from such a perspective. I think it’s a set of issues which is going to tremendously increase in importance as the accelerating technological evolution continue in face of all the social, cultural and economic turmoil and shifting.

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The ills of socialism, with or without the state

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

I just exited a thread I titled Anarcho socialism worse than statism? started on July 27 and currently eight pages long. Before and during that time I’ve had a number of on and off discussions with people whom could probably most precisely be described as anarchists which oppose property ownership at least to some extent and in some forms. From a perspective of what I believe to be most voluntaryists and all anarcho-capitalists they’re typically dubbed anarcho-socialists.

During that time I have occasionally doubted my assessments as my understanding of their positions changed. After all they are different individuals possibly holding somewhat differing variation of the general idea. However at this point I remain generally disappointed and even frustrated with it. Here are some of the core arguments which from my understanding represent various anarcho-socialist positions, and my responses to them.

1. “Property is theft” (represented by multiple arguments leading to that conclusion).

This is a famous statement by Proudhon which according to what I’ve been explained is also commonly misinterpreted. In any case however it is the ultimate conclusion of a number of anarcho-socialist arguments. I’ll start with the one least problematic to me.

“Property stolen by means of state is theft.”

According to this argument Proudhon was referring to “property” in terms of the state rather than in terms of the free market, that is, property which was essentially stolen by means of the state such as the institution of a corporation. Since the means of the state typically involve force and fraud rather than voluntary trade a lot of what is currently considered as legal property (in state’s language) is actually stolen property – thus enforcement of this property is enforcement of theft.

Any instance where the law assigns supposed “property rights” where none would be acquired by voluntary trade would be an example of that.  One example are eminent domain laws which can sometimes be used to essentially steal from one to give to the other and then proclaim it as legal property of the other.

Because of this it is rather hard to discern genuine from stolen property since the state is so deeply involved in the market. For example some argue that any and all property acquired by corporations is illegitimate because the corporation actually is not a real person, but rather just a conceptual or institutional puppet of a real person, with privileges assigned to it by the state. Thus it acts with powers that a real person otherwise wouldn’t have, powers assigned to it by the state at the expense of other market actors. Anything that a corporation could not acquire without these powers yet acquired with them is therefore considered as stolen property.

It isn’t surprising then that some would take this to the extreme and argue that all property must be stolen property quickly assuming the position that property ownership is impossible to enforce without the state, which is the second argument I’ll address. Indeed, that is the current popular belief and a claim by state actors themselves. What the state says is legal property is considered to be the legitimate property, as if it has nothing to do with individual and voluntary trade in the market itself, and everything to do with arbitrary decrees of state actors (even if elected through a democratic process).

I am inclined to agree with Proudhon if this argument is the correct interpretation of what he said, but only when it refers to property which truly was stolen by means of the state. It I however act independently of the state to produce or acquire something it is reasonable to assume my property was earned, not stolen.

“Property is theft because it cannot be enforced without the state.”

As mentioned above this is what the extreme extension of the above argument leads some towards. Since the state steals and yet it is the one defining property and most people believe it, property and theft are conflated. It is then enough to observe someone’s house being taken from them by law only to be teared down and the land transfered to a corporation who is to build a mall there to put an emotional seal to this reasoning. Since the state does this in the name of property and the land is proclaimed as the property of the corporation yet the scene clearly depicts an act of theft, property and theft seem like the same thing.

In that instance the concept of property is so out of shape that it is hard to imagine how property could even exist without the state. It no longer refers to the control of that which you produced or acquired by your own efforts or through trade, but rather to a mere arbitrary entitlement by people with the guns, regardless of effort and voluntary trade.

Thus the argument that property cannot exist without state enforcement takes shape which also provides the seeds for the argument that any defense of private property is itself immoral initiation of force.

Unfortunately, this is all based on terrible fallacies. It is as if in the process of being maimed and pillaged the people lost sight of who their tyrant was and what his actions were. It’s as if they begun believing their masters lies and are now using those lies as arguments against those who would otherwise be their friends against the tyrant (typical affront between anarcho-socialists and anarcho-capitalists). It is as if they forgot what ownership used to mean, because it was just the opposite of theft.

In any case, ownership as defined by voluntaryists and anarcho-capitalists indeed has nothing to do with what the state decrees it is. It has nothing to do with arbitrary expropriation by force. It has to do with earning what you have by your own effort and being responsible for your actions. For my more specific exposition on property please see here

Thus how is it possible that the ones who are the biggest violators of property could be the only ones that can enforce it (the state)? This is a question I think every anarcho-socialist ought to honestly try to answer because it directly challenges their assumption that property requires the state.

So if property does not in fact require the state, the question that pops up is who will enforce it? The answer is relatively simple. Property owners or their agents. Today the state seemingly plays a role of an agent, but it actually is not. Since it is a coercive monopoly on the service of property protection (which is actually just a form of self defense) it does not so much provide that service as much as it forcefully imposes it. You don’t hire a state agent to protect your property. The state agent never gives you that option. Instead they take your money as supposed payment for this “service” through taxation against your will which is exactly the opposite of protecting property. It is its violation.

In fact real property protection today doesn’t really exist. If it did it would protect you from the state itself. So it’s not only that property protection does not depend on the state. It is actually supposed to remove the state altogether to function.

“Property is theft because its enforcement depends on initiation of force.”

This is just the evolution of the above and as I’ve shown it is thus based on really shallow grounds. It stems from conflating state violence in the name of protecting property with actual protection of actual property. The state’s actors often claim to do their work in the name of noble ideals such as freedom, even when they invade foreign countries and homes of innocent people. Are we supposed to then dismiss the idea of freedom because this is what they do in its name?

It’s the same thing with property. They violate property in the name of defending property. Are we supposed to dismiss true defense of property then as violation of property as well? Because that’s what this argument essentially boils down to.

However, while this argument may have evolved from the conflation of statist inversions of property with actual property it does have a life on its own, which isn’t surprising since most people who use this argument probably don’t typically make a connection between their animosity against property and their animosity towards the way state acts about it yet they need to defend their position and then try to find the best arguments to back it up.

Unfortunately even these arguments rehash the statist thinking. For instance, they provide examples of poor or homeless people taking the property of others in order to sustain themselves and the property owners purported attempts to defend from such theft as initiation of force. Such arguments attempt to use human tendency to empathize with the poor and unfortunate to trick one into reversing the defense of property into initiation of force, thus becoming consistent with the “property is theft” ethos. This reverses the roles of the poor thief and a richer property owner defending from such theft so as for the property owner to be the one who stole (by denying the poor to take) and the poor thief as the one who is stolen from.

What is easily missed here is that the fact that the property owner by virtue of his ownership may rightfully defend his property does not mean that he has to. It only means that the decisions pertaining to the way his property is to be used belongs to him.

Since it is the human tendency to empathize which this argument uses it is reasonable to assume that this argument assumes that empathy IS important and even common enough. If it wasn’t then why appeal to it in the first place? Yet if empathy is common enough for an empathy based argument to be worth using isn’t it reasonable to assume that most property owners confronted with a poor thief wouldn’t just force him out, but instead try to help and even let him use some of their property?

And as a final straw for this argument there is the fact that it sets a dangerous precedent in that it puts ownership to the subjective whims of those who claim a need that is supposedly large and immediate enough to override it. Suddenly anyone who can present his wants as severe enough needs can justify their theft. This of course can backfire at the very those whom this reversion of property is supposed to benefit: the poor.

Fundamentally, a claim that defense of property or property enforcement is *initiation* of force rather than defensive force leaves very little room for self defense, or at least makes it dependent on subjective whims as mentioned above. Unfortunately this relativization of property and thus self defense makes self-defense always a potential crime because the extent to which your self and your property extends is constantly at the whim of a society or social norms rather than a verifiable facts of your just effort and trade. That is, whether you have acquired something by honest action and trade no longer matters if someone can claim a “higher need” and still steal it from you.

I mentioned that these kinds of arguments rehash the statist thinking and here is how. Statist socialists use the same “think of the poor” kind of arguments appealing to the same human empathy to justify theft in form of taxes. The only way in which anarcho-socialist argument differs is that they outright redefine theft so as to reverse its meaning, but the outcome is the same.

This makes the anarcho-socialist position which uses this argument no better at all than the statist socialist position.

2. Pure capitalism leads to the state.

Above I’ve addressed the idea that property ownership, which is fundamental to capitalism, requires the state. In other words it was the idea that capitalism cannot exist without the state.

This argument is a little different in that it implicitly presupposes the existence of pure capitalism without the state first and then an inevitable devolution of it to state capitalism. The way this is supposed to happen is by the greed and selfishness of the capitalists going beyond voluntary trade and into the realm of force and fraud thus establishing conglomerates which ultimately become the state. There are probably many ways to be thought of exactly how this may happen, but addressing all of them isn’t my point.

In fact I wouldn’t even argue that this cannot happen. I would argue instead that if it does happen all it means that capitalists who started perpetrating force and fraud failed to be capitalists, or rather they weren’t capitalists, and that the system that resulted wasn’t capitalism at all, but the statism that we all know and love (NOT). Essentially it is corporatism. Even minimal state overseeing a free market has the seeds of corporatism and becomes real corporatism as soon as it establishes the limited liability and “legal person” institution called the “corporation” (LLC, LTD, Inc., Gmbh etc.)

In other words it is not pure capitalism that leads to statism, but rather the lack of capitalism. This boils down to my old argument about not blaming peace for war. If we are living in peace, meaning that everybody respects everybody and there is no violence and then after some time someone comes out and starts inciting conflict and initiating violence what will we blame for this state of violence? Will it be the fact that we had peace? Of course not. We will blame the fact that this individual started using violence.

In the same sense, if we have pure capitalism it means we have individuals respecting individuals and their work (their property) and trading voluntarily and peacefully. If someone then comes out and starts cheating people and initiating force to get more business, will we blame capitalism or will we blame the person who violated the very principles of capitalism?

This is also why it is extremely unintelligent to blame recessions, including the current crisis, on capitalism and the free market. It is precisely like blaming peace for war. People cheat and steal and we blame those who propagate against cheating and stealing for it. Government bails out corporations and we blame the free market? Those kinds of things boil my mind.

Imagine a brother hitting his sister who was just playing in peace and the mother shouting at the peaceful sister because she is just playing in peace and “causing” the brother to hit her. It’s truly a WTF moment, but tell that to the millions upon millions of people out there, including Michael Moore, currently spitting at capitalism and free markets. They have no sane idea what they’re doing.

So this argument doesn’t really make sense. The only resort it has is to claim that capitalism itself is flawed which would probably come down to the arguments against property which I’ve addressed and hopefully debunked above.

3. No authority should be admitted, thus no authority derived from property ownership.

This was pointed out by my friend when he described briefly the position of mutualists he has had some discussions with. According to him they actually believe in self-ownership, but instead of as seeing it as a base of property ownership they see it as the very reason why property ownership (beyond the self) should not exist. To quote:  “I own myself and therefore others have no authority over me, and as a result, no authority over others is acceptable. From this principle, property rights MUST conflict with self-ownership.“

However this position is self-contradictory and ultimately leads to the same issues pointed out with the above addressed reversal of property ownership into “theft”. If nobody should have any authority over you then the poor people taking something you believe belongs to you don’t either. Their needs, no matter how basic, do not establish their authority over your desire to keep what they’re taking.

Then it might be argued that your authority ends where their authority begins, but since this position espouses no-authority that would clearly be a contradiction. In fact a no-authority position transmutes into a no-liberty position because your liberty ends where someone’s liberty begins which inevitably implies some kind of an authority. Thus denying all authority is denying all liberty. This just doesn’t work, at least if your goal is liberty to begin with.

Thus the no authority position seems to overspill each individual’s “jurisdiction” (for lack of a better word) all over each other rather than establishing a balance. The area of overlap is the area of conflict. By saying nobody has any authority over you under any circumstances whatsoever you’re essentially taking an absolute authority position over everyone else. If everyone makes this assumption and acts on it this is essentially anarchy as chaos, that is, everyone against everyone according to their own whims.

4. Property vs. Possession

From all that I’ve heard about the concept of possession so far I am compelled to conclude that possession actually is nothing more than a crippled, relativized and subjectivized version of property. The concept is essentially designed to give way to socialized defining and redefining of what may a person possess and keep, basically submitting the individual to some extent to the established social norms. This is because the main reasons that possession is even admitted to the individual are subjective, namely, the “basic needs” of the individual – what he needs to live.

One person may feel his basic needs to be quite different from another so one person may claim more possessions than another. If one person believes the needs of another person to be lower than that person believes himself this leads to conflict. There is no one size fits all objective model of needs. Not only do they to a large extent depend on personal evaluations, but even to the physical and mental capacities of each person which cannot as easily be evaluated by another on sight. Some people are more efficient in their consumption of life giving resources than others depending on their physical build up, skills, experience and so on. It also isn’t uncommon for people today to claim needs which a lot of other people would feel are luxuries.

Who then is the final arbiter of this? Apparently nobody and everybody which is just another way of saying “the society” in reference to popular social norms. Since it is precisely on this determination on which the difference between self-defense and initiation of violence may be determined it is clear how this could leave a lot of people with an experience of being tyrannized by the majority. This is essentially mob rule, even with less pretense than the idea of democracy.

Conclusion

I have very little respect for socialism, both with or without the state. As a voluntaryist I clearly have no respect for statism so it goes without saying that I find socialist statism unacceptable.

Anarcho-socialists tend to say that they are the “real anarchists” and that the label “anarcho-socialists” is superfluous. They also say that anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. This comes from their understanding of anarchy as “no-authority” rather than “no coercive rule” or their reversal of “coercive rule” through denial of property ownership in which the defense of property which would otherwise be considered self defense, becomes itself coercion.

Unfortunately this reversal tactic is what’s most disgusting about all socialism in general. Socialism as the name implies is ultimately never really about the individual, but rather about the abstract “society”, something that does not exist without individuals to begin with. Socialist positions and arguments sometimes pretend to defend the individual, yet the outcome is paving the way to socialized control. An affront to property ownership is used to cut into the individual by infecting the objective realm that underpins property ownership, causality, with subjective whims the aggregate of which is represented in form of social norms that are accepted as the “common sense” and thus “the truth” (provided this is even believed in anymore).

Anarcho-socialists however are a particularly sad case since they seem like a traumatized version of a socialist. They’ve recognized the ills of mainstream social (dis)organization yet they’re still pretty severely infected by the memes which make such social organization possible. They’ve learned to oppose the state yet they still operate on the memetical paradigm that the state itself operates on which makes them into excellent treadmill runners, going absolutely nowhere. Besides, when have ever the anti-globalist and anarchist protest resulted in any kind of real change other than to parade violent rioting as the de-facto image of “anarchism” and thus taint the perception of enlightened and intellectual anarchists with it.

Anarcho-socialism is socialized control without the state. They may passionately deny this, but the consistence of ideas they typically advocate inevitably lead to this. Why else restrict or relativize property ownership, bringing some extent of it to the whim of society?

The trouble is, the state itself to a very large extent exists precisely because the stateless socialized control is already established. It is ultimately the ideas, the memes, which run the world. State is just the ultimate reflection of prevalent social norms. If the masses didn’t believe that it is right to steal in some limited instances taxes would not exist. If the masses didn’t believe that violence is acceptable in enforcing “good ideas” a coercive monopoly on law would not exist. If the masses didn’t believe that violence is an acceptable way of solving some social problems war against citizens either in other countries or “at home” (“war on drugs”, “war on terror” etc.) wouldn’t exist. And so on.

Violence of course is the ultimate result of any “socialization” of the individual, any part of the individual. It may be renamed and redefined, but still exists.  Socialization by definition means absorption of one individual into another, which is exactly what conflict is. Metaphorically speaking, it is the collision of individuals in terms of their values. This is because a society does not really exist as any one thing in reality. Only individuals do. So sacrificing any individual for the society is in reality sacrificing one individual for another, or absorbing a part of one individual into another.

Socialism, in any form, thus inadvertently promotes conflict in the name of harmony.

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