"There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come" - Victor Hugo
Memeverse represents a universe of ideas - whether good or bad, trivial or revolutionary. Ideas define who we are and who we are becoming. The right idea can make a difference between life and death, poverty and prosperity, slavery and freedom. To be fascinated with ideas is to be seduced by their promise: a different way of thinking, a different way of living and a changed world.
This site is a portal to my thoughts and personality as well as my services and projects collectively branded as "Memeverse Media". It contains my personal musings as well as the references to my latest works elsewhere. Feel free to explore, comment and get in touch.
I think a lot of confusion in thinking and discussing comes from failing to recognize one crucial requirement for having clarity: singular. What I mean by this is that it is absolutely clear what we are talking about, a single thing, clearly defined and described AS SUCH, without vagueness and room for guessing around. Otherwise we’re trying to “focus” on two or more things at once and that is no focus at all.
The effect of such lack of focus or clarity is that we basically don’t know what we’re talking about and end up making judgments that are terribly at odds with reality. Yet this ends up leading our action in false hope for desired positive results. Focusing on singular and thinking in singular rather than plural, is a key to precise thinking.
This came to me when I was trying to explain why I don’t believe in the existence of a “collective” in reality and thus why I don’t believe in “collective rights”. The argument is that the “collective” is in fact solely a mental abstraction describing multitude or plural. Two or more human beings can then be described as a collective. Two or more trees can be described as a collective (and synonymously a “forest”, another similar mental concept) and two or more cells can be described as a collective (or synonymously a multicellular organism).
As such this mental abstraction is similar to numbers. The only difference between saying “collective” and saying a number like “4″ is that in the former you don’t specify exactly how many, merely that there are more than one (plural) whereas in the latter you’re specifying how many. But a number 4 itself doesn’t exist in reality. Looking at 4 people you see “4″ in your head merely because you have the mental capacity to count. If you didn’t then you wouldn’t have the mental concept of “4″ to use in your description of what you see. Same goes with the concept of a “collective”. You see “more than one”.
But does a collective actually exist in reality? This isn’t the same question as the question “do individuals referred to by “4 people” exist or “do cells referred to as an “organism” exist”. It is a question like “do 4 people exist as an individual” or “does a forest exist as a tree” or “does an organism exist as a cell” or “does a molecul exist as an atom” and so on.
The formula is: Does a plural of X exist as a singular X where X is equal? The answer is always inevitably negative because it is:
A contradiction in terms, an oxymoron.
Many cannot be without the one. Plural cannot exist without a singular, but a singular can exist without a plural
A plural of trees cannot be a tree, it can be an individual forest. A plural of cells cannot be a cell, but it can be an individual organism. A plural of atoms cannot be an atom, but it can be an individual molecule. A plural of human beings cannot be a human being, but an individual society, for lack of a better term, or something else that we as human beings cannot from our vantage point exactly determine, or perhaps nothing at all; end of line as far as that type of form is concerned.
So when it comes to the concept of a collective it may be an useful abstraction sometimes, but it is clear that a collective of X cannot have the properties of X and itself is not X. It instead becomes something else that is again itself individual; unique. Or nothing else. This is why it makes absolutely no sense to think in terms of there being a human “collective” for the good of which individuals should sacrifice expecting that this good would somehow trickle down to more good for all.
Additionally, the object of focus can never be anything other than individual, singular. Even when trying to somehow point to a “collective” that exists in reality we end up describing “it” as “it”, a singular thing, thus further validating the individualism rather than “collectivism” of its nature or at least showing ourselves unable to, when we actually begin thinking with such precision, actually pin point the “collective” in reality when some voluntaryist challenges: “Show me the collective, where is it?”.
Granted, both “plural” and “singular” are mental abstractions, but it is pretty obvious that we cannot refer to anything in reality without going through the abstraction of a singular, even when we wish to refer to a “collective”. In other words, the only way to directly describe things in reality is through singular, not plural.
So it would appear that both our minds and the reality itself is naturally wired as individualistic rather than collectivist. There are merely multiple levels, one being fundamental to another which is fundamental to a yet another and so on possibly indefinitely, but an individual thing always comes first and it’s “collective”, as we would mentally describe it, only ends up creating another individual thing.
Collectivist is murky thinking. There is no precision in an argument which has collectives as its variables.
My advice to those kids would be to resist. They don’t have to pay. If I were a parent I’d comfort them with the idea that we will find a way to resist. Nobody will pay any of THEIR debt. Taxes are theft. Gun is in the room. One should defend self from the thiefs not justify their actions and give in.
Besides, speaking of federal government it probably wont exist by the time these kids are adults. An increasing secessionist activity in USA is already testifying to that. About 8 states have “secession friendly” resolution.
The world is changing. This crisis is a free market finally reacting to the decades of delusion and resulting unsound economic practices. This crisis marks the biggest shift in centuries. Bail outs and stimulus packages are only gonna make this fall more profound. It may get worse before it gets better as certain governments let out a dieing scream and trashing, but then it can get better.
I have just read a book “The Science of Getting Rich” by Wallace Wattle which likely influenced Napoleon Hill, the author of “Think and Grow Rich” which I’ve read and praised earlier.
I have to praise this one too and without hesitation I can recommend it to everyone looking for constructive insights on how exactly to attain wealth and success, especially since it’s just 66 pages long.
“The Science of Getting Rich” is what also largely influenced The Secret, a popular movie from 2006 that popularized the concept of “The Law of Attraction”, albeit such a term isn’t found in the actual book.
That said, just like “Think and Grow Rich”, this book greatly resonates with me. I can see the logic in them and I can see exactly how applying philosophies expressed in these books can lead one to success. Think and Grow Rich especially has a pretty solid mount of evidence in support of the positively transformational power of its ideas as many successful and wealthy people reportedly cite that book as being a major influence to their success.
I can also say that it certainly made me a lot more likely to succeed as I can with absolute confidence say that in part thanks to these books I am far more confident about myself and far more daring. I have transformed and solidified my view of failure as part of success, of limitations as primarily mental and self-imposed, of wealth creation as a noble rather than morally reprehensible goal, and so on.
Yet I am still somewhat uneasy, or at least, I am eager to express something that I feel could make the philosophies presented in these books more complete, and put them deeper within a rational and scientific context. There are two reasons for this.
Confusion over The Law of Attraction (and The Secret)
As much as I could say that “The Secret” movie brought philosophies of these books to the masses I would say that it perverted them or dumbed them down to the point at which pretty much the only thing an average person could get from it is that “I can get whatever I wish in my mind by the simple act of wishing”. And I can see how can these philosophies be brought down to this incredible oversimplification. The fact that they zeroed in to this term “Law of Attraction” which immediately implies that the core of the idea is attraction, not action, doesn’t help at all.
Yet both Wallace Wattle and Napoleon Hill emphasized the importance of taking action. Even the movie itself, The Secret, glossed over this briefly, but insufficiently.
That said, Wallace did pretty much say that strongly envisioning something you desire in your mind and being grateful for getting it even before you actually get it (in order to affirm your absolute belief in that you will get it) will directly cause a chain of events independent of your physical action that will make the thing you desire to be attracted to you. In a nutshell, this guy believed in the Law of Attraction.
However, this is what leads me to the second reason of my “uneasiness”. He uses terms which CAN be interpreted in a different way where a different light is cast on the whole “attraction” business and where thought itself doesn’t necessarily have to be considered a direct cause of your getting what you desire. In essence, the whole action-reaction chain that ensues once you form the desire filled and confident thought in your mind may be slightly different than what most readers of Wallace and perhaps even Wallace himself, is led to believe.
This would be a result of our limited understanding of that which we are, through these ideas, beginning to discover. The ways in which we are describing it are still inefficient and insufficient to precisely pin point the exact science in question. Due to the amount of people that succeed by applying these ideas it seems plausible that we ARE looking at a glimpse of truth rather than a fallacy, but due to the limited understanding, we may be getting some of the crucial details wrong, which is the case regarding “The Secret” and “Law of Attraction”.
Thoughts, energy and action-reaction chains
First of all, it is currently scientifically understood that all matter in existence comes down to energy. When an object, no matter how big or how small, is inert, it has potential energy, albeit on a more fundamental level it is never inert so inertion is relative to the observer. When the same object becomes active it converts its potential energy to kinetic energy. And due to the conservation of energy law energy is never actually destroyed or “spent away”; it’s simply converted from one form to another.
It is then conceivable that physical forms of shape could also be considered as specific forms of energy, of potential energy if anything. Wallace Wattle talks about “formless substance” and this is where it appears that energy fits right in. But then we enter the realm of thought. Wattle also describes this as “formless substance that thinks“.
If formless substance is energy then the question is can energy think? If everything in existence is fundamentally energy though then human beings and other thinking life forms are energy as well in which case through them energy can and does indeed think. Observing what happens in our brains when we think does reveal that our thoughts are in effect just a complex stream of impulses, of energy!
But the concept of “formless substance that thinks” seems to imply that energy thinks regardless of whether it holds a form of a thinking life form or not, in which case a tree thinks itself into existence as a tree, a rock thinks itself into an existence as a rock and so on. Can this be?
Well, to answer this would require defining “thought” and this again refers me to the observation of thoughts as streams of energy in which case thought is nothing but a patter of energy flows. Thoughts then ARE energy. Thoughts then could be considered a fundamental building block of everything in existence.
In that case by the very virtue of being, a tree thinks. The only difference between a tree that thinks itself into existence and a human that thinks itself into existence is that a human is aware of his thoughts whereas a tree isn’t, giving a human the power to transform his thoughts and therefore himself and direction of his growth whereas the tree just “instinctively” grows according to parameters established by itself and the rest of the thinking reality.
So where does law of attraction or its rebuttal as it were fit in?
Well, it implies a very specific thing. It infers from the above realizations, provided that LOA supporters have these realizations, a particular action-reaction chain without actually seeing any empirical or logical consistency evidence of such an action-reaction chain occurring. It infers that because we are all made of thought-energy that our envisioning a particular image strongly somehow materializes this image into a physical equivalent. But what basis do they have for concluding this? This is NOT a necessary conclusion of everything being consisted of thought-energy and it ignores the many intricate ways in which thought-energy actually flows or interacts with that which it constantly creates.
So even if all of the above is true, that everything is consisted of thought-energy thinking itself to existence, it doesn’t necessarily follow that I can think something else aside of me and my actions into existence, something that on a macro scale never actually interacts with me. I think this is all coming from a gross misunderstanding, or lack of understanding, of the laws which actually govern “thinking”, that is, a process by which thought-energy shapes itself into forms we see around ourselves, and the universe at large.
What we CAN conclude based on actual evidence though is that a thought can cause an act and that therefore one indeed cannot achieve anything before previously envisioning that something in the mind. The efficiency of any given act in its ability to bring us closer to the achievement of our goal is directly dependent on our understanding of the action-reaction chains which are necessary to achieve it. Most of us probably still use crude methods and do things which we might not necessary have to do, that are superfluous to our goals, but we’re still learning.
Theoretically though it is possible that as we begin learning more and more about precise action-reaction chains involved in how everything comes into being (or in other words the process by which thought-energy creates) we MAY be able to by the power of our mind alone replicate things we envision out of thin air, by arranging our thoughts in such a way to create an energy impulse that arranges molecules of air surrounding us into whatever we have envisioned.
But we’re likely a very long way there and still have plenty to learn.
In conclusion, I think that it is worth considering what was written in “Think and Grow Rich” and “The Science of Getting Rich” as it IS evidently changing people’s lives for the better. I think that they are scratching the surface of a new understanding that may soon become a real science. The fact that they sometimes sound almost mystical or add what appear to be superfluous conclusions (like law of attraction) merely reflects the limitedness of their understanding of the actual source of the ideas they have through their thinking and observing discovered, not that these are ideas are completely false.
If you have doubts about the right to own guns for protection of yourself and your property, watch this video. It completely nails the argumentation for the right to defend yourself without being forced to rely on the government, and how denying this crucial right results in more crime and violence and less security.
I am going to do what is bound to be unpopular in this time when so many americans are “high on hope” and can’t see clearly what’s in front of them. I am not a believer. I am an individual who dares to think with his own head instead of with the head of state. Here I bring you a number of deceitful passages quoted from the Obama’s speech and respond to them.
At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.
No you haven’t been faithful to the ideals of the forbearers. If you had you wouldn’t be invading foreign nations in pre-emptive strikes. You wouldn’t have your income taxed. You wouldn’t be disarmed by your government at every chance they get. Your property wouldn’t be violently invaded because you smoke or heaven forbid grow certain plants. Government would be there as a fearful servant and not a master of the people. Its sole job would be to protect your life, liberty and property. Anyone who has actually looked at the constitution would frown at what Obama said here and be extremely skeptical about anything he has to say further on.
How can so many people praise this man in tears is beyond me, when he so blatantly lies to them!
Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.
Why not be blunt here Mr. Obama and just spit it out. You’re speaking on the countless times discredited “war on terror”, when in fact your government and its agencies have cause more terror both in USA and the world than there could have ever existed if you just stayed out of everyone’s business. The “far-reaching network of violence” is precisely how the very government you are taking control of can be described.
Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
Collective failure? Let’s see. What is the collective here? A group of individuals. In this case the reference is to the hundreds of millions of individuals in USA. What is a failure? For there to be a failure there must be a goal that was not achieved by the set of choices that were meant to achieve it. Can a “collective” make a choice? Is a “collective” some sort of a singular entity that breaths by itself, separate from the individuals that make it up? Clearly not. Only individuals can make choices. Only individuals can have goals. Only individuals can thus fail. There is no such thing as a “collective failure”. That is just a lie designed to “spread the guilt” even to those who had nothing to do with the failures of others, just as you seek to “spread the wealth” even to those who had nothing to do with actually earning it.
Of course, it’s not the first time that a politician is using vague collectivist terminology to seduce the masses of individuals. It is like religion. So long as people believe there is such a thing as a “collective” existing in and of itself, they will submit to those who claim to be, like priests, representative of this “collective”. But it is a lie.
Unfortunately, and as can be expected, similar vague indefinite language continues throughout the rest of this “great speech”.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
No, you came here to seduce the masses into giving you and your government legitimacy that it needs to continue looting and destroying the very people you are appealing to. Bush destroyed the image of the company you represent, the US Government, and you come with your shiny, glorious new PR campaign to “clean up” your image. Do people truly believe that just putting a new president, a new face, on the same old beast, changes its nature? Are people that deluded?
You are perpetuating the petty grievances and false dogmas, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, in a new packaging.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
And you know this how? You asked every single of the individuals you speak of to know that they all were driven by some sort of a “self-sacrificing” urge to build up this imaginary entity you call “America”? Last time I checked most people who came to USA came out of their own self-interest, to build their own life success, not the success of “america”. That you look at the aggregate of all this success and proclaim it as somehow appropriated in the name of your own religion doesn’t mean they all share the same sentiment. Do not speak in their name. Speak for yourself and yourself only.
But who am I kidding, right? There are millions of people out there looking at him like he is the messiah himself, even if they don’t otherwise believe in such a thing as a “messiah”, and just waiting empty-minds and shut thoughts, waiting for him to speak in their name. His words, their words. His thoughts, their thoughts. His mind, their mind. If that’s what you call freedom and greatness why not just strap yourself into the Borg collective of some sort and give up your individuality completely? That is exactly what you’re doing.
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works–whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.
Can your government do anything without coercing those whom do not want the service it offers to buy it anyway? Who, exactly, gets to say whether something works or not? Shouldn’t an individual get to make a decision in what to buy into and what to reject? Your government offers no such choice. Beneath this pile of words stays nothing but raw initiated violence. You said it yourself, Mr. Obama, “what essentially sets the nation-state apart.. is the monopoly on violence”.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control–and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.
Another blatant lie. The market WAS under a watchful eye of your government. Your own government encouraged baseless spending and debts by encouraging loans to those whom clearly could not afford it. Now that it collapsed, you are blaming a lack of government involved. Something is seriously messed up about that logic. More government involvement is, and this can be easily researched by anyone caring for the facts, exactly what destabilized the economy. The so called “free market” was never completely free, for it was constantly regulated and its actors taxed.
We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
Again, you are describing your own organization. When your organization sets an agenda, usually a very expensive one, who is going to pay for it? The people with their taxes, of course. What if someone doesn’t agree with your agenda and wishes not to pay for it? They must, for if they don’t, they’re thrown in jail. Talk about terror, pay up or suffer. Consider the definition of terror, “one that inspires fear”, “a state of intense fear”, “violent or destructive acts”. This is only to mention the domestic terrorism perpetrated by this government, let alone the terror perpetrated in other countries, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza.
This comes down to nothing more than a leader of the popularized mafia sending a message to the less popular mafia organizations: we will defeat you. And the war continues. No change. None whatsoever.
We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.
Meaning greater than themselves, such as in your organization perhaps? Why cannot an individual himself or herself decide who is to defend his or her liberty? Why do they must rely on and pay for, regardless of whether they agree or not, armies of individuals ordered by your organization’s directives to kill and plunder, in the name of “defending liberty”?
But those values upon which our success depends–honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism–these things are old.
Seriously, do people listening to this have any precise idea of what these terms actually mean? Honesty and tolerance? Honesty to admit to yourself that by saying that something must be illegal, that something must be done by the government, is the same as saying that those who do not agree with you and those who do not want to pay for the implementation of your own beliefs, must still violently be coerced into conformance to your beliefs?
Hard work? You mean work to pay your debts because government told you it’s fine to buy what you cannot afford? Work only so quarter to half of what you earn be taken from you to fund wars and implementations of beliefs with which you don’t necessarily agree with? Work to earn property which you cannot use on your own terms, as if you weren’t the owner? And all this in a country supposedly built on pursuit of “life, liberty and property”?
Loyalty to Obama? Patriotism, love for the state and not your own values?
Do you ever question the words used to seduce you into uniform compliance?
Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.
Mr. Obama, not everyone believes in your gods. Nor everyone believes in your government, for obviously very good reasons. Some people, unlike the masses weeping in mindless emotional fervor every time you hypnotically chant your vague sentences, actually think as independent and free individuals, not units within some great collective.
In face of yesterday’s global protests against Israeli attack on Gaza I found an article that puts things into an alternative perspective: “The Hollow Sound of Anti-Israel Protests”. It seems to justify Israeli attack on Gaza and portray Israeli strategy as the more positive one, which is something I don’t quite agree with, but it does point out an apparent lack of innocence on part of Hamas, which continuously espouses violent ways of solving the problem, apparently involving obliteration of all Jews.
I of course blame both the Israeli government and Hamas, for both are in fact terrorist mafias whom see violence as an acceptable way of solving perceived problems. Everything else is just a variation on the theme. Israeli forcefully imposes it’s fantasy of “jurisdiction” on to private palestinian property owners in a continuous campaign of terror. Hamas then imposes itself as the so called protector of these same palestinians, whether they asked for it or not, and then goes to bomb Israeli people and yet again provoke a violent response. And this goes on and on and would go on until either all israeli in the area or all palestinians, or at least members of Hamas, are obliterated. The way these people think about solutions, the only real solution is genocide.
Neither are the average palestinian and israeli people all that innocent, for their belief in violence as a sometimes morally justified way of solving problems is what fuels both Hamas and Israeli. If people stopped believing in violence without compromise, and therefore stopped believing in their governments as coercive entities, there would hardly be anyone left to wage a war. To stop believing in violent solutions is to open your eyes to all of the ways in which the problem can be settled peacefully.
And in fact, since to stop believing in all violence means to stop believing into such bullshit as jurisdiction, public property and collectivism, a big part of the whole problem would disappear by itself. There is then no border or claimed territories to bicker over. There are only individuals and their private property. Some of them may call themselves palestinian and others Israeli, but even that ceases to matter as much as it did.
The belief in violence as an acceptable way of dealing with those with whom you have a dispute with is the fundamental cause of all war, including this one. Complete rejection of this belief is the only solution. Voluntaryism.
There is some serious talent behind the Zeitgeist movies. They may present the current top standard of the propaganda genre so it is perhaps somewhat comforting that what it propagates is not all lies and that what it presents does have the capability to make people rethink their beliefs and positions. Even to only make people start thinking about them at all is already some progress made. That’s what I would expect from anti-establishment propaganda after all.
However, Zeitgeist is still a terribly mixed bag of a lot of truth and just enough lies to make the whole thing seem dubious for recommendation. The important thing is to do your own thinking and your own research in order to discern fact from fiction. If you are capable of doing that and resisting the emotional appeals to acceptance of the author’s message, then I can recommend Zeitgeist, especially Zeitgeist Addendum.
What I based on my previous thinking and research consider as true in Zeitgeist Addendum are the claims presented with regards to how money is created and what money in fact represents – nothing but debt. It very clearly explains the inherent flaw of the system that is its complete dependence on perpetual and growing debt. It also, in my opinion, rightly concludes that monetary system as it has been set up leads to an illusion of scarcity that people believe as real. The result is this great and growing divide between the poor and the rich.
Inflation, as probably the most dangerous hidden tax, caused by the absurd fractional reserve banking system, combined with the fraud of interest and ignorance of the masses towards what money actually is, in fact makes most people living today in this ignorance into a modern form of slaves.
They work to get money because money is seen as the only means by which to purchase what they need, but money itself is a debt that must be repaid. In effect, even if you personally do not owe anybody any money, even if you never bought anything on credit or took a loan, you having the money that you have relies on somebody else owing that same amount of money to the banks. Basically, all money in existence is owed to the banks and if it were all repaid, money would cease to exist, and if it is not repaid it means that the banks will take the supposedly physical equivalent. Therefore, you effectively end up working to create wealth on which the banks already have a claim to, through the very money you earn by creating this wealth.
The theory further proposed is that all of the previous and current political and economic systems have been used in service of the minority of powerful people at the expense of the majority. The states were effectively never at the very top of the food chain, but the private interests. A system that actually seemed to enable the richest among us to gain the most power ever was the so called “free market capitalism” that originated in USA. The key reason may be the fact that freer markets tend to be more productive and more innovative and therefore creating more wealth and the fact that it’s expansive nature and tendency to cross borders led to its extension, in some form, across all of the world: globalization.
Of course, since the US version of free market capitalism had a state and therefore americans and the rest of the people in the world legitimized some forms of violence as moral, the profit motive that drives private interests combined with this legitimization of violence as good in some cases led to private interests quite willingly abusing the governments of the world to force their interests on others.
And this is where Zeitgeist Addendum authors make a key mistake. Zeitgeist describe all of the coercive ways in which governments operate in the interest of their private overlords’ profits, yet the only thing they blame is the profit motive and not these coercive ways.
And that’s where it all breaks loose. They begin with a tirade against the profit motive and self interest, completely and blindly dismissing the fact that without mass legitimization of violence through government, big profit driven private interests would not be able to do what they blame them to do. The monetary-ism they are describing cannot exist without legitimization of violence through government. Yet instead of portraying coercion as the problem they portray self-interest as the culprit, thus yet again making the same mistake pretty much all revolutionaries before them have made, and are now basing a movement on it.
Their solution seems very attractive, but considering the above also very misguided or at best vague. They speak of lack of scarcity caused by the technology. They speak of laws not being necessary as technological solutions are found to problems that laws would face. And they almost seem voluntaryist. They seem unwilling to force people into anything and even their method of persuasion, completely apolitical in nature, seems very in line with voluntaryism – the change being in the mind – order being emergent rather than established (forced) and so on. But unfortunately, they mix these noble intentions with false collectivist concepts such as common good.
It’s almost like some form of voluntaryist communism. I can sympathize, but everything that bases itself on unreal concepts may in some way be doomed to fail.
I believe it is not the profit motive that is the main culprit. It is the legitimization of coercion. To deny self interest is to deny self. Even if all humans were on some level one with others and the universe (and in some way I can see how that can be), on another level differences emerge which allow for different entities having different properties and therefore being distinct as what they are. We recognize human species as distinct from other species based on things by which we are different from others, yet common to each other. The same way we can recognize each human individual by what differs him from other human individuals.
If it weren’t so we would not be human individuals. Therefore to use this philosophy of oneness is to mistake the forest for the trees or from another perspective, the matter and energy we are all consisted off for the distinct individuals that these same matter and energy make us into. It is to see only a part of the picture. To deny self-interest is to deny the existence of self, but for a human individual to deny the existence of self would be immediately self-contradictory, because it is the self that made that denial.
Once the Venus Project and people behind Zeitgeist realize this and modify their message and strategy to include the recognition of individual self and his or her right to choose for self and consequently realizes that it is the coercion that is fundamental to the problems observed in the world today, I can join their movement. Otherwise I can only recommend you to tread carefully. They have some good practical ideas and they may motivate you to oppose the establishment, but keep in mind that you do not have to give up your self-interest for the vision of the world similar to the one they propose, or better, to become true.
You only need to reject coercion as a moral thing, in all instances in which it occurs.
