Michael Mitchell: Archive

There's only one way to avoid any form of human conflict: self-esteem. No one harms someone else for the sake of harming someone else. They do it for a reason. They think it will benefit them in some way, but the truth is no one has ever benefited anything from winning a human conflict.

If you steal property from someone else, you may have "gained" the property, but you lost self-esteem. You're literally not capable of appreciating the value of what you "gained". You know you don't deserve it. That you didn't earn it in any way. That's where self-esteem comes from, from achieving your goals and creating your values. No one who can achieve their values is unhappy and no unhappy person has anything to gain by stealing from or harming others.

It's necessary to defend your values when they're attacked, but you don't gain anything by defending them, even if you fail, because you already have the self-esteem from successfully creating them. You already know you can achieve values. You know you're the strong and anyone who tries to steal shit from you is weak. They may be able to physically defeat you, but they couldn't survive without you 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 is usually what causes the conflict, not the desire for conflict itself, because everyone knows you can't gain from it. Even when force is initiated, it's usually pre-emptive, based on the assumption if you 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 scared.

That's from an individualistic perspective.

The real problem with force is when you do it for others. You know it's not right to do it for yourself, that it won't lead to any real values, but it's not so easy to see when you're doing it for someone else, like "solving" the alleged inequality problem. If you think a billionaire's a bad guy because he's rich while millions of people are starving to death, then you think using force to steal wealth he created is justified. He didn't use force to gain his wealth. He did nothing wrong and everything right, but you think you can force him to do what you think is right because you decided some poor person deserves his money more than he does simply because they're poor, not because they've done anything to deserve it.

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

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.

You 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 the rich man it's bad and for the poor man it's "good", but for you, it's neither, because you're not doing it for yourself at all. You're being completely selfless and therefore beyond moral responsibility.

And that's the shit we've been taught is moral, and also why everyone is miserable and warring with each other or resigning to helplessness, because whether you do right or wrong, you fail. If you give up your shit, you don't have your shit and if you don't give up your shit, you're a bad person because someone somewhere doesn't have shit.

Anyone who understands how people bounce back and forth between the emotions caused by this nonsense can literally control people like puppets. Force is only necessary to control the ones who don't buy into the bullshit.

It is bullshit, though. All it will ever lead to is either death by destruction or death by starvation because the system rewards thieves and punishes producers until one way or another, by choice or by coercion, there are no producers left.

Force just doesn't work.