Michael Mitchell: Archive

"'Value' is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept 'value' is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible."

--Ayn Rand

There's only one way to avoid any form of a human conflict of interests: self-esteem, valuing yourself. No one violates someone else's rights for the sake of violating someone else's rights. We do it for a reason. We think it will benefit us in some way, but the truth is no one has ever benefited anything from the use of physical force (or fraud) against others.

If we steal property from someone else, we may have "gained" the property, but we lost self-esteem. Before we chose to do it, we accepted moral defeat, the belief that we couldn't earn it ourselves, so we're literally incapable of appreciating what we "gained" as a value. We know we don't deserve it. That we didn't earn it in any way. That's where self-esteem comes from, from achieving our goals and creating our values. No one who can achieve their values is unhappy and no unhappy person has anything to gain from coercing others to "achieve" them. It's a contradiction.

It's necessary to defend our values when they're attacked, but we don't gain anything by defending them, even if we fail, because we already have the self-esteem from successfully creating them. We already know we can achieve values. We know we're the strong and anyone who tries to steal shit from us is weak. They may be able to physically defeat us, but they couldn't survive without us to steal shit from. After they run out of victims, they're doomed.

It's true that we think most people in the world don't understand this. That's why we have wars. We think other people want to take our shit, so we take their shit before they can take ours, but that fear (at least, in modern times) is usually what causes the conflict, not the desire for conflict itself, because we know we don't gain from it. Even when force is initiated, it's usually pre-emptive, based on the assumption if we don't take action first the other side will.

Very few people are actually criminals or total nihilists, people who really don't get it, who actually think destroying shit can create shit or that stolen shit is valuable, and all of them have exactly zero self-esteem. Everyone else is just overreacting to fear.

That's from an individualistic perspective.

The real problem with the use of force, why it's so difficult to see it's wrong, is we can rationalize doing almost anything for the interests of others without personal consequence. It's obviously wrong to use it "selfishly", and most of us understand it doesn't lead to any real values, but it's not so easy to see when we're doing it for someone else, like when we think we're merely "redistributing" wealth from those who have more than they'll ever need to those who don't have enough. If we think billionaires are bad because they're rich while millions of people are starving to death, if we judge them by that juxtaposition alone, as if their wealth was stolen from the poor or as if it's their moral responsibility to feed the whole fucking world, then we think using force to steal wealth they created is justified. Assuming they didn't use force to gain their wealth, then it was acquired voluntarily from willing traders on a free market -- which actually means they "contributed" much more to society with their businesses and products than their money ever could -- but we think we can force them to do what we think is right because we decided poor people deserve their money more, simply because the poor are poor, not because they've done anything to deserve it.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

--Socialist Propaganda

This is altruism. It's based on the belief that the majority is weak and that the few who are strong must support everyone else. Why would anyone choose to be strong, though, when they can just be weak and get free shit? They wouldn't, so they have to be forced.

We can justify anything in the name of "doing good" for someone else, because it's completely outside the context of right and wrong itself, for us. Sure, for the rich it's "bad", but we don't give a fuck because they deserve to be punished for being "greedy" or "uncharitable", and for the poor it's "good" because they need the wealth more than the rich do, but for us, it's neither. We're being completely selfless and therefore beyond moral responsibility, beyond the benefit or detriment of our beliefs and actions, which we think somehow makes us completely moral.

And that's the shit we've accepted as good, and also why everyone is miserable and warring with each other or resigning to helplessness, because whether we do right or wrong, we fail. If we give up our shit, we don't have our shit, and if we don't give up our shit, we're bad because someone somewhere doesn't have shit. Anyone who understands how we bounce back and forth between the neurotic emotions (unearned guilt) caused by this nonsense can literally control us like puppets. Force is only necessary to control the ones who don't buy into the bullshit, like "privileged" rich people.

It is bullshit, though, on any socio-political scale. All it will ever lead to is either death by destruction or death by starvation, because punishing the most productive for the sake of the least productive just doesn't work.