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.

I just had a little game idea that would promote greater awareness about the language we use to convey certain thoughts and encourage people to think more about what they believe and what they’re saying.

There are a lot of myths circulating among people and some of them are literally mind numbing. They keep using a particular term or a particular sentence or even a slogan without really thinking about what it means to them and what does it truly refer to in reality.

The game would basically keep popping up such myth-full sentences and ask you to fix it, to write down what it really means and if there is nothing beneath it then what is the equivalent. I think an example will best illustrate what I mean.

Starting with a simple sentence:

• Democracy is freedom.
• Fix: Democracy is mob rule.

Here is a little more challenging one.

• Government is here to protect you.
• Fix: People calling themselves the government think they need to protect you.

Not a very effective argument against government perhaps, but it does seem to reflect the truth much better and that’s the whole point. I think that if people thought about what particular sentences really refer to, to basically dismantle the abstractnesses which cover up what’s beneath, they would soon by themselves realize certain fact that they may have never been aware of before.

In case of this particular sentence, saying that “government is here to protect you” implies that there is someone or something called government that is “here” to protect you or that it exists for your protection. This isn’t quite clear unless your thinking is fuzzy and you’re fine with it remaining fuzzy. Who or what is “government”?

The fix demystifies “government” as people, the group of people. “Here” is removed because the place doesn’t seem to have any relevancy to the intended meaning, unless it did in which case we could leave “here” in so the sentence would be “People calling themselves the government think they are here to protect you”. Also the myth that they exist to protect you, as if it’s their sole purpose in life or as if it was an absolute truth, is removed and replaced by that they think they need to protect you.

Indeed, people in government are often led by genuine beliefs. Obviously, I find those beliefs to be extremely irrational, but that’s what’s leading their actions.

I’m not sure what kind of programming would be required for this kind of game to be made, but I’d allow multiple “correct” answers for the fixed sentence because various people may form their sentences in various ways. It could also contain direct equivalents to particular words which would always apply, such as in above case where “government” is replaced by “people calling themselves the government”. This kind of substitution would probably work in most sentences.

Other substitutions may include replacing “public good” with “individual liberty” or “personal liberty” (public good doesn’t really exist.. it’s only individuals which we can be concerned with), “nation” with “group of people calling themselves a nation”, “taxes” with “theft” or “stealing”, “president with “a person calling him/herself the president”, “law” for “rules forced by one group of people to another” or “rules forced by one person on another” etc.

Anyway, I just wanted to express that idea.

Cheers

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

“Freedomware” is a marketing term for Free Software which conventially refers to software that is licensed in a way that grants the software user rights corresponding to the four freedoms devised by Richard Stallman.

Many believe that licensing software with these rights, and offering it along with source code which is a precondition to exercising these rights, is the only moral and/or ethical way of offering and distributing software. Others may merely concede that it is ethically superior, but not necessarily the only ethical way or even that ethics doesn’t even enter the picture and that it is merely a practical concern.

Rarely, if ever, does anyone take issue with the act of “licensing” itself as it is understood by most people today. As such licensing essentially involves a software developer combining a chosen piece of text or his own piece of text with another piece of text written by someone from the organization called government to form a set of rules which, as the general belief is, must be respected under the threat of force if you don’t.

Don’t look so surprised. Every set of rules that comes from the government organization and is usually called “law” is forced. There appears to be no exceptions.

That said, since I don’t believe in initiatory force I don’t believe in government nor law, and therefore I don’t believe in copyright law. You can tell that greatly alters my perspective of Free Software. I no longer see government as a valid party in the developer - user relationship and what a “copyright license” ends up being is nothing but a statement of probable requests by a developer to the user of conditions he wants to be met before and while the software he produced is used. I could call it a sort of a contract.

Furthermore I actually believe in developer’s right to state whichever conditions he wants stated for the use of software he originally made, no matter how restrictive they are. I believe, in fact, in his right to do just about anything that doesn’t involve force upon someone else.

And that’s a catch. In a circumstance in which all involved parties, unlike me, believe in the validity of government and law, therefore giving others the power to initiate force upon them, they also believe that a copyright license is forced. So when a developer’s conditions are too restrictive, those restrictions are forced on users, unless they choose to not get that software in the first place, which as we’ve seen was a pretty hard thing to do considering the fact that vast majority of software used to be under restrictive licenses.

What gave this threat of force teeth are numerous cases in which such force was indeed initiated, such as many homes raided in search for “pirated” software or music CDs etc. It was enough to show people that they have something to fear, albeit not quite enough to stop mass illegal file sharing from continuing.

In such conditions, in which everyone believes in this force as legitimate they would of course try to find just as legitimate means to impose conditions which are a little more favorable. Enter four freedoms, BSD, GPL etc..

These are copyright licenses just as any other and are therefore using the system of force just as any other. They just happen to be a little nicer in their requirements, according to most people. You are *allowed* to do more. It was definitely a path to *more* freedom and as freedom always does it spawned more innovation and production of software wealth.

Unfortunately, by depending on an anti-freedom system to exist, however, Free Software has not nor ever will, alone and by itself, give people true freedom and 100% of freedom. Richard Stallman, indeed, is not your savior. The proliferation of his ideology merely enabled an option which makes the force in the name of law more bearable, even if much more bearable. His copyleft may turn copyright may have turned the “default license” on its head, but it changed absolutely nothing about the nature of copyright as a set of rules forced on anyone.

Now, if everyone, like me, stopped believing in the validity of “government” and “law” they would also stop feeding the power of those professing to work for the “government” and “law”, removing the teeth of force. A developer still has every right to state his conditions, but the only laws that could enforce whatever these conditions are the laws of nature, or if he chooses so, his own fist or gun, in which case he’ll quickly find himself out of the software business and in the shame of ostracism, if not worse.

So a proprietary software equivalent in this situation would be software binaries offered by a developer under the conditions that it not be copied at all (perhaps with the exception of a backup copy) and that it is installed on only one computer at a time. If someone buys a copy of his software and specifically agrees to these conditions, yet breaks them by making more copies and installing on multiple machines, the developer would have all right to complain to the undersigned arbitration agency and seek damages.

The arbitration agent is an expert in law, but not the law some people wrote to force on everyone else, but the natural law, the reality, the science of things, including the nature of humans and human interaction. That said, it is still possible that an arbiter would sometimes judge that the user needs to pay small damages fee, but it is unlikely that it would ever be a prohibitively expensive sum. However, after a while it is likely that there would be a precedent set which would essentially determine that in reality there is nothing the user actually damaged the developer for.

The copies he gave are often to people who wouldn’t buy it anyway, yet neither of the copies made leave the developers with one less. Software is not moved from one location to another like physical objects. It’s multiplied. I don’t lose anything if you make a copy of a song I made and gave to you. It would also soon likely be determined that often times the user actually gave developer free marketing by sharing his software, even if against his will.

Before you know it it would simply be a normal free market practice to not even bother with such restrictive contract terms because they just don’t work in reality. Not only do they sooner or later put both the developer and the user through the arbitration costs, but denying people to do free marketing for them is just a bad business strategy, not to mention stupid.

Interestingly, this is something even today when most people believe in “law” and “government”, Sun Microsystem’s president Jonathan Sczwartz realized.

The conclusion is, in a free market without government proprietary software as we know it would be simply stupid. Today it exists because it can still count on governmental coercion and related institutions of force. As long as we cling to such surreal abstractness as “government” and “law” to justify initiatory force we will suffer this dichotomy between reality and our own shared belief (illusion).

Free Software is extremely likely to be the default consideration of everyone in the truly free market.

This is partly why being a voluntaryist far outweighs my being a free software supporter. I believe the problem of proprietary software will be resolved much more easily and much more naturally in a truly voluntaryist free market.

However, not enough people have realized the illusion that their belief in government and law institutes yet. Within those circumstances the way I would define Freedomware or Free Software is as software which has been offered to me without the threat of force for such uses which correspond to four freedoms defined by Richard Stallman, which happen to coincide with everything I might want to do with my software anyway, without anyone who does believe in law and government viewing me with contempt and wishing to force me from doing otherwise.

In other words, the realm of Freedomware is just a bubble within the current system of force in which I can do some things I want to do without force being threatened against me for such actions. This is, of course, what makes Freedomware largely preferable to me, but since these rights provisioned for me via Freedomware licenses still totally depend on the system I oppose and invalidate it’s a rather awkward situation. I therefore will not promote “better copyright licenses” as a reason for people to consider free software.

Some might make that statement to mean that I am withdrawing from the free software movement, considering that some might consider the freer licensing to be THE definition of free software. But I find a little more in it: the culture and the mentality. Even if I forget the licenses, the law, the government, all that crap, I’m still left with the culture of sharing that developed around the concept that software should be free. There is still the mentality which makes people not mind if I something they made is shared.

That kind of mentality and that kind of culture is the kind of mentality I want to thrive in a free market and therefore I will continue to stand by it.

Where does that put my involvement with GNU/Linux Matters and Freedomware Marketing I am yet to decide. How do I promote this culture without promoting copyright law and the current system that involves coercive government?

I am a geek. I am a party guy. I am a thinker. I am an entrepreneur. So where do you want to categorize me? Those of you who like to keep things nicely pigeon holed and stereotyped.

You can’t. I am a geek yet I am not a nerd who doesn’t know how to have a good time. I am a geek yet I am also a music producer and a fan of trance music, the party music. I am a geek yet I don’t wear any freaking glasses! I am a thinker yet I don’t have a god damn sweeper in my ass. I am a serious guy yet I don’t make everyone depressed by my presence.

And at this night out I had both a philosophical discussion session, getting drunk session and a dancing session, all in one night. Impossible? Apparently not.

So stereotypes and categories be damned. I am I. I am unique. I am an individual. I destroy stereotypes. I destroy myths. I destroy conformism. I am the one, among the few, that are many, who are the individualist revolution.

Thank you.

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?

Well it’s a weekend, and while I do spend some weekends working on the main stream of my work, AKA my job, I sometimes take time for one of my “hobbies” if you can call it that. I have lots of interest so sometimes I just feel I need an outlet for those which I am not mainly involved with - like music.

So.. aside from exploring some games on GNU/Linux today, and getting bored after a little while, I went to songza to play some music and then somehow ended up doing the same thing on youtube, when an interesting idea hit me. Why not create a playlist of all these incredible trance tracks I love to listen? So I did… and I felt good about it so I even made it into a subpage on Cosmicall.net. Behold the Entrancement Tech as I called this playlist.

The name seems fairly unique judging from a brief google search so I might even stick to it as some sort of a brand for some of my future music involvements. Who knows what I’ll be doing next after Libervis.com and Nuxified.org are back in shape. Aside from promoting voluntaryism, music is pretty high up there. One of the long planned Libervis projects is all about music. But I wont talk about it more yet..

Anyway, the name “Entrancement Tech” has a meaning to me. I see electronic music as literally an expression of feelings through technology, because pretty high tech devices (well.. computers usually) are used to make all those cool tracks. But most of all I feel like trance really pushes this aspect to the limits. It is incredibly emotional and energetic and at the same time incredibly smooth and technological.

For me listening to trance is like listening the high tech machines crying and singing, except it’s just me, in love with technology and what it makes possible - celebrating it by listening and jumping (yea.. literally, when I go to a party like… this one (yep I was there!) ).

So.. to those who share my love for this sort of culture. Enjoy the entrancement.

Gotta love it! Digital technology is inspiring tremendous amount of innovation and it shows no signs of stopping. Hardware is becoming cheaper as its power grows exponentially. This in turns allows rapid expansion of broadband speeds and access and growing number of multimedia resources and uses on the internet. Today you literally do not need to download and store your music before listening to it. Instead you tune in to one of the hundreds of internet radio stations playing more music and less commercials than most traditional radio stations.

Or you go to a web site like Songza.com, type in the artist or song name and click. It will stream right away. No registrations and no payments required, yet just about all songs you can imagine seem to be available. You can even do playlists and rate the song quality as good or bad in order to help make those of good quality rank higher in their search results. Beneath the hood it actually seems to be searching the web for all music files which are streamable, regardless of whether they are part of some video on youtube and other video sites or is uploaded by someone on a public space.

It probably isn’t even too vulnerable to the lawsuits by the music industry considering that it doesn’t actually provide songs for download and doesn’t really facilitate illegal music sharing as much as it merely, like Google and Yahoo, indexes what’s available out there. So if Songza is to be sued for doing that, Google too should be sued for indexing whatever “illegal” material is out there.

So in short, I love it!