my_text_data/writings/non-competitive society.md

Non-Competitive Society

by Miloslav Číž (drummyfish)

version 0.22, December 23 2020

Released under CC0 1.0, public domain (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).

Available at https://gitlab.com/drummyfish/my_writings/blob/master/non-competitive%20society.md.

keywords: society, competition, anarchism, capitalism, socialism, communism, non-violence, free software, FOSS, open source, free culture, collaboration, technology, universal basic income, pacifism, democracy, veganism, idealism, leftism, rightism, equality

Preface

I think it may be beneficial for this text to come with a little bit of meta information, for the context to be clear. Let me write it here.

This has been written solely by a single person – me, drummyfish. It reflects my personal opinions, ideas, educated beliefs and life philosophy I've created so far, regarding politics but also technology, philosophy and society in wide.

The text is written in plural, as if by a collective of authors who all hold my opinions and so maybe belong to a movement, but keep in mind it is so far only me. I have simply found it comfortable to write this way, perhaps because I like to imagine my ideas adopted by more people.

My education is in the area of technology, not history or politics. I am also not a native English speaker and this is the first text of this kind I have ever written. So much has to be said in order for potential errors to be explained.

I haven't written this for any specific purpose – I am not intending to start a movement, even though I wouldn't oppose its formation either. I have simply found that writing helped me explore and analyze ideas, and that it helped me personally in various other ways. Another reason for writing this has been simply a desire to share ideas. A practical use of this work that I imagined was it serving me as something I could refer people to when I am having discussion with them, as I have lately found often repeating myself and reformulating my arguments over and over again – now I can simply point to paragraphs of this text.

If anyone finds this work useful in any way, I will be glad if you use it. You can share it, sell it, edit it, build upon it and so on. You can do absolutely anything with it, that is why I share it as public domain under the CC0 waiver, in the spirit of the ideas I am about to present. I believe that what you do with this text is your responsibility, not mine.

This document is not connected to or endorsed by any existing organization or movement and it has not been sponsored by anyone.

Introduction

This document outlines a model of a possible ideal human society and a subsequent life philosophy, which if adopted by many people would lead to largely implementing it.

But isn't this just communism? Yes and no – not in the usual sense that equates communism to recent historical failures and atrocities of "communist" movements. However, this is a far left idea (definition of which will follow further) pursuing ideal communist society using an approach new in many ways, different by being non-violent, peaceful, evolutionary, opposing rightism as well as leftist populism and false (pseudo) leftism (such as feminism, LGBT and Antifa), and revised based on recent history, observations of the late stage of capitalism, the state of modern technology and so on.

Our theory mainly merges existing ideas, old and modern (e.g. anarchism, non-violence, free culture, distributed systems), into a greater whole and tries to show and prove the result is consistent and valid. As it's been hinted, we aim to very slowly start replacing competition – the main but now obsolete drive behind the current society – with collaboration. We provide all the reasoning for why it is important and how we want to do it without violence and with as little harm as possible (considering no change can be achieved with zero harm).

What concerns us about modern society is not that it has flaws or that it is still far away from our ideal, but that instead of trying to get closer to the ideal we are heading in a completely opposite direction by supporting and strengthening capitalism, business, nationalism, competition and so on. What we want to achieve is not, unlike with mainstream communism, a revolution and putting in place a new world order, but just steering the direction of society in the right way.

Unlike many groups using an idea simply as a weapon or a tool to gaining power in competition with other groups, we are primarily looking for the truth. Our goal is not power or defeat of competitors, we aim to search for truth, knowledge of which will naturally lead to a better society. For making decisions regarding such an immensely difficult question our approach has to be scientific, based on rationality and logic. Therefore if we stand behind an idea that someone proves to us being faulty, on the grounds of logic and scientific evidence, it is in our interest to immediately abandon it, reevaluate and change our approach, because continuing to support an idea that's been proven to go against our goal would simply be madness, working against ourselves.

An important thing we have to do in order to seek truth is to abandon so called shortcut thinking. This is a kind of thinking that allows us to evaluate various concepts quickly by simply remembering associations, e.g. laziness is bad, theft is morally wrong, criminals should be punished and so on. Shortcut thinking is necessary for functioning in our daily lives, because our brains are incapable of fully evaluating all concepts at all times, but in scientific efforts it can lead to completely wrong results, because we simply avoid evaluation and checking of facts that may no longer hold true. Shortcut thinking is very often abused by politicians and used to justify goals and means that are logically unjustifiable. We want to avoid this and so it is required we try to evaluate concepts we are working with against our goals and deduce the relationship ourselves.

Regarding idealism, we often hear critics say it is dangerous. Isn't the pursuit of ideals – such as communism – what has historically caused the most harm to the society? To this we say no. It has always only been the violent and forced pursuit of ideals what caused us the unimaginable suffering. But it is the force – not the goal – what has hurt us. On the other hand, a non-violent, non-restricted pursuit of ideals, such as the effort of countless artists to seek absolute and ideal beauty, or the effort of scientists to seeks perfection with their theories, is what has made us, the mankind, flourish the most. We intend to take a similar road.

Our proposed non-competitive society is a superset of – besides others – anarchism, pacifism, free culture, free software, multiculturalism, non-violence, idealism and rationalism.

What is Left, Right and Pseudo Left

Regarding the terms left and right politics there are good and bad news. We need to make clear what we mean by these terms as we will be using them frequently.

The bad news is there is a considerable confusion about the terms and their exact meaning isn't widely known, which is extensively abused by politicians and populists. Part of the reason behind the confusion may be that historically these terms have been used in ways completely violating their correct meaning, e.g. by Nazis or nowadays the US Democratic party – both very much rightist parties. Nazis called themselves national socialists (socialism being a leftist concept), but their actions and values were undoubtedly completely rightist (as explained below). On the other end, "communist" regimes – pure communism being a leftist concept – widely practiced rightist behavior, such as totalitarianism. The good news is there exists an extremely simple definition which allows to very easily distinguish between the two terms.

Let's now present the definitions of left and right that we will use, as we can find them e.g. at Wikipedia.^[WRL]

• Rightism means supporting social hierarchies.
• Leftism means supporting social equality (i.e. opposing hierarchies).

Some examples of rightist concepts are:

• companies: Companies create hierarchies, both external, i.e. among each other as competitors and owners, and internal, i.e. by organization of their employees.
• nationalism: Preferring to benefit or support a specific group of people – for example a nation – before other people is the definition of rightism.
• capitalism: Capitalism is based on competition, meaning the stronger (more successful) stand above the weaker. It is well known to lead to great inequality between social classes, exploitation of the working class by the bourgeois, wage slavery, extremely unequal distribution of wealth, great poverty and so on. Karl Marx and others did a great job in describing these effects.^[MCM]
• racial supremacy: Very obviously, one race standing above another is by definition a social hierarchy.
• fascism: Again, a superiority of a group of chosen people over other people is very clearly a social hierarchy.

Some examples of (true) leftist concepts are:

• free (open source) software and hardware and free culture:^[FRS][FRC] Granting everyone equal rights to usage of information, technology and art is an effort towards eliminating the hierarchy which arises when people are divided into owners (with all privileges) and users (with limited privileges).
• anarchism: Anarchism by definition tries to eliminate all social hierarchies and their causes, such as capitalism and states.^[AFQ]
• pacifism: Opposition to violence and war is opposition to the most prevalent means of force that is used to create hierarchies of stronger above weaker. In a world without violence, oppression of others (an effort for creating a hierarchy) would be extremely difficult.
• multiculturalism: Though having a wide meaning, the idea of different cultures and ethnicities living together supports their equality and stands against such rightist ideas as national or racial supremacy.
• veganism and animal rights advocacy: These extend the idea of equality of human beings to also include animals, i.e. sentient life that can also feel suffering. Vegans and animal rights activists may still not oppose the natural hierarchy and food chains between animals and may disagree on the question about lower level life, but their effort is always directed towards flattening and at least partially eliminating the hierarchy among life forms.

We intentionally don't mention communism because even though communism is based on a very leftist ideal of a society of completely equal people, the term is too strongly connected to Marxism and derived pseudo leftist ideologies advocating rightist means such as dictatorship of the proletariat. To many people the term is associated with practice of not very leftist attempts at pursuing communism, such as Leninism or Stalinism.

Let's also mention what we will call the pseudo left (or false left). Pseudo left movements are usually called left and may possess some aspects of it, but their behavior violates some fundamental ideas of leftism. These movements typically come from the extremely capitalist west where true left simply doesn't exist anymore, not even as a widely known concept.

Some examples of pseudo leftism are (not surprising prevalently US movements):

• feminism: Feminism is nowadays agreed by many to have degraded to a movement fighting for female superiority^[FES] and gaining political power, using means such as forcing ideas and laws, using violence and bullying (legal, psychological and physical), pursuing a revolution (which, as explained below, we are against). Examples of this include the metoo bullying campaign or supporting codes of conduct^[COC] in free software development. This is in accordance with our observation (explained later on in the text) that the name of the movement indicates its goal – the movement is named feminism (implying female), not gender equality.
• LGBT: LGBT has gone the same road as feminism, to gaining power through force and fear, no longer caring about equality, but about the fight of homosexuals et al. against heterosexuals and everyone who simply disagrees with the LGBT gospel (e.g. gay marriage and adoption of children by gay parents). Their infamous pride marches have become a demonstration of power and give an impression of military parades meant to spread fear and war mentality. They also take part in aggressively pushing harmful codes of conduct^[COC] in software development. The disinterest in actual equality is supported by the fact that LGBT doesn't endorse sexual orientations that are nowadays unpopular and whose support would cost them political power. These include e.g. pedophiles, zoophiles and necrophiles, who are prosecuted as rapists and criminals (just as gay people were only a few decades ago, also resembling witch hunts that cost many innocent people their lives).
• Antifa: Antifa is yet another movement opposing a rightist concept, but they are a militant (violent and oppressive) group, using very rightist means of fight, war, violence and oppression enjoyed by its members, making them actually a rightist group that simply competes with other rightist groups such as Neonazis. For this they are criticized and rejected by true leftists.^[AFC]
• US Democratic Party: The party is called left in the USA but that is nowadays very clearly only a historical label. Democrats today are as much leftist as Nazis were. They are capitalists,^[DEC] populists and militarists and only a slightly less extreme right than Republicans, to whom they serve as opposition, and so are called left just out of convenience, not because of factual reasons. True left is basically not present in the USA in any significant form, and there is no longer even a wide knowledge among the people what true left means.

Just for the record, let us stress that we are for the social equality of all people, both genders, gays and all other sexual orientations including the ones that are nowadays prosecuted.

There exists so called horseshoe theory that states the extreme left and extreme right become similar in their behavior, just as both ends of horseshoe get closer further away from its center. This theory is flawed, because again, what it calls an extreme left is in fact pseudo left, i.e. something originally left, which however degraded into rightism. The following model more accurately captures reality:

            LEFT    <--------------,-,-,-------------->   RIGHT
          difficult               / / /   .->              easy
     long-term solutions:        | | |   /      quick, short-term solutions:
non-violence, empathy, equality,  \_\_\_/       violence, war, brainwashing, 
     rationality, freedom,                     control, censorship, fascism, 
    voluntarism, sharing, ...                   supremacy, hate, slavery, ...

We can see left and right are clearly distinguished. Right, unlike left, offers quick and easy solutions (which however become very bad in long term), and so behaves as a kind of magnet, exerting a constant force pulling towards right on every individual. A way to true left is therefore very difficult and requires a constant resistance to this force, to resorting to the attractive but wrong solutions. This force diverts many people from their leftist path to the pseudo leftist one, and it is also why right has been prevalent in the history. If we put enough effort to make ourselves strong enough to resist the magnet of rightism, it will be possible to reach true left.

Those calling themselves conservative are usually rightist, because conservatism means keeping the old values, which have prevalently been rightist.

It has to also be noted that the common and traditional view of a family – the one that prefers to benefit its members before other members of the society – is by definition rightist. However, this is only one possible view of family and so by opposing rightism we aren't opposing families as such! Our view of a family is just different. To us, a family is a group of people who are emotionally closest to each other, and so they want to e.g. spend most of their time together. This is completely supported by us. What we oppose is e.g. the idea of trying to achieve better education for own children on the detriment of other children.

The Issues of Competition

Though our civilization likes to think of itself as advanced, it hasn't, since its departure from the jungle, still solved the very basic issue of unconditionally guaranteeing food and shelter for everyone, and it is dealing with countless catastrophic issues that hint on the opposite of success: extreme large scale poverty^[POV] while eight richest people own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world,^[WDI] wars and crime, extreme destruction of life environment, moral decline, surveillance and loss of privacy, restriction of people's freedoms, aggressive advertisement, declining mental health^[MHD] and happiness of people, financial crises, terrorist acts such as mass shootings, media control, plutocracy (loss of democracy) and many others. And though people generally see these issues and acknowledge their threat and necessity to be solved, very few make the extra step – or perhaps are lead not to making it – of actually looking for the root cause, which is the only place where the cure can be effectively applied. Curing the symptoms is all the society is trying to do, even though it is clearly not enough and just creates more and more issues. If we keep asking ourselves why is this happening for long enough, we will always get to the underlaying cause – capitalism, and eventually simply competition and rightist thinking.

We will talk about capitalism and competition a lot – these two terms are not equivalent, but from our point of view and in the context of the analyzed issues we can use these mostly interchangeably. We see competition as the ultimate root cause of the presented issues, but since capitalism (a system based on competition) is absolutely prevalent nowadays, very well observable and widely familiar to most people, and it is at the same time the greatest manifestation of the presented issues of competition, we will sometimes use the word capitalism as meaning a society based on competition. Capitalism cannot exist without competition and (as we will try to show) society based on competition will lead to capitalism as we know it today (hence capitalism cannot be fixed, as the only fix means getting rid of competition, which immediately gets rid of capitalism). Capitalism may also be seen by some as only an economic system, but when it is spread so widely as it is today, it inevitably permeates other aspects of society, such as culture, art, politics and the mentality of people.

Richard Stallman, the father of free software, has written in his GNU Manifesto:^[GNM]

"The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way. If the runners forget why the reward is offered and become intent on winning, no matter how, they may find other strategies—such as, attacking other runners. If the runners get into a fist fight, they will all finish late."

This itself is a good point, but many will argue this is a solvable issue, and the reason why we have laws and rules for the markets. Indeed, we have seen capitalism somewhat "working". But if we take a closer look at the principles of competition and also at what we're seeing nowadays in the late stage capitalism, we will find that unfortunately competition is unsustainable. Let's take a closer look at what happens in the long run.

quality (improvement)
  ^
  |
  |                                 _______
  |                          ______/
  |                    _____/
  |               ____/
  |          ____/
  |      ___/
  |   __/
  | _/
  |/
  +------------------------------------> effort (time, cost, …)
0

This graph shows a dependency of improvement on invested effort, called a learning curve.^[LCU] It applies to practically any improvement – performance of an athlete depending on how much time he has spent training, improving chess skills, quality of a product depending on how much money and time have been invested into it etc. Note the non-linearity of the curve – improvement becomes more expensive the more we have already improved. Or in other words, improvement gets more and more expensive over time. (Even though the curve may sometimes look a bit different, e.g. have an S-shape, or even show accelerated improvement at the beginning, such as in case of Moore's law, there is always a point from which improvement slows down as we're approaching the physical limits etc.)

For example if you decide to start jogging without having sported before, you'll see a quick initial improvement – in a few weeks you'll be able to jog even several times further and faster. But the more you've improved, the smaller improvements you will see. When you've been jogging for years, a few weeks of additional training will definitely not make you jog several times further.

Why is this fact important to us? It will show us that what mr. Stallman has said in his manifesto – competitors getting into fist fights – is not something only the bad guys do. It shows it is what everyone inevitably has to do if they want to win the competition. It is because of this fact – improvement getting progressively more expensive – that from a certain point only a minuscule improvement in the product or service quality costs a company an extremely large investment. From this point, the company can no longer effectively compete by improving its product – pouring money in this effort will keep improving the quality at a snail's pace and making it slower and slower. Since the company is now in stagnation, its competitors will soon catch up with it, improving their own competing products to a very similar quality level, at which point small random fluctuations (such as fashion) will unpredictably decide which company will be preferred by the customers.

What the stagnating company however can do to effectively spend its money is invest in hurting the competition, or otherwise unethically fight for their position at the top (e.g. by forcing the product with false advertisements, using political power etc.). There are many ways of hurting competition, legal (not necessarily ethical) and illegal. It may simply be destroying the competition by buying it, fighting with unfair prices, creating cartels, corruption, defamation, legal battles, patent trolling, technological war, media war, getting unfair advantage e.g. by secretly violating customers' privacy and so on. Even though people will find temporarily lower prices a good thing, all of the mentioned practices go against the beneficial promises of capitalism and hurt the society, at least by creating monopoly, preventing actual improvement and innovation of competitors, and some are downright dangerous to the people and destructive to society.

A great recent example of corruption by capitalism is technology. Purposeful obscurity by corporations seeking to protect their secrets,^[FRC] unnecessary burdening systems – such as DRM, advertising or spyware – built into products, consumerism-driven meaningless burdening features (bloat),^[SUC] fight and hostility towards objectively better ways (e.g. free as in freedom software), against being able to repair technology (Apple), these are just some features of modern technology that are not an exception – they are the standard.^[TGE]

Companies can be seen as machines programmed for pursuing one goal – profit at any cost, as much as possible. Not to innovate, not to contribute to society, not to make people's lives better, just profit. Laws don't pose moral standards to companies, they pose only an obstacle that is to be overcome, bypassed or destroyed. A corporation is a psychopath^[CAP] who's been given an immense power to rule over people.

A company is a machine that is intelligent, but has no emotions, empathy or conscience like humans. It runs on humans, has humans inside, but is structured in such a way that the resulting higher entity is not like a human at all.^[CNH] It exploits the intelligence of humans to make decisions about how to best make profit, but since ethical behavior is in this regard an obstacle, it has evolved to have mechanisms to prevent ethical behavior. This often manifests itself in the employees saying "don't blame me, I am just doing my job". Everyone is just doing their job, everyone needs to make living, no one can be blamed, and yet, the company keeps doing horrible things. An extreme example of such machines were the Nazi extermination camps, in which very few people would approve of what happened at large scale, but thanks to the spread responsibility and everyone just doing their job an unimaginable number of people have been murdered.

Some still argue that companies are like people – only some have bad intentions and behave in shady ways. They say only corporatism is bad and that small companies are different. This statement is very far from the truth, because in order to be successful in the world of hard competition, a company cannot take on the disadvantage of only behaving ethically. A small company that intends to survive is always an aspiring corporation. Deciding to only behave ethically or not taking the chance to become a corporation means giving up an advantage and ultimately losing to those who behave unethically – just as in the jungle those who decide to not take every chance to survive will simply die. It is simple – if you don't do everything you can to beat your opponents, you will lose to those who do. And indeed, taking a look at the real world confirm this.

Yes, you may have seen a small company behaving nicely, or even a big one doing something good as a PR move – this is possible. But in the long run, the small ethical company will either get devoured by the competition, or it will grow and be forced to change its behavior to the unethical. The probability of a company behaving unethically and the evil it does far surpassing the good converges to 100% as time goes on.

If we are interested in the future, improvement, stability and sustainability, we simply have to look foremost at how our model behaves in the long run, analyze the late stage, not the early or mid stages. In the long run, competition degrades into oligarchy – rule of the winners who only strengthen their position and weaken any potential threat of opposition. The supposed benefits of capitalism, such as the principle of supply and demand – i.e. what is demanded by people's needs is encouraged to be supplied by the market – fall apart in late stage capitalism, as demand becomes something corporations with enough resources can arbitrarily control and create, e.g. by advertisement, psychological manipulation, media manipulation, purposeful denial of controlled resources, creating arbitrary issues to subsequently offer solution to etc. There exist Internet companies that successfully sell animal feces to people.^[SHE] No longer are the true needs of people controlling what the market should try to create, the suppliers (ruling monopolies) themselves dictate what people should need.

This makes sense also from just logical viewpoint – the essential principle of competition is to encourage progress by promising something extra to the winners, and so motivating them to innovate. The capitalist system promises to the winners power (wealth, fame) and monopoly (e.g. the copyright or patent monopoly,^[CMO] or just monopoly via the power of money). This does encourage innovation at the initial stage when everyone is on the starting line, but it eventually leads exactly to what is promised – power and monopoly of the winner, which is extremely harmful to the society. We should never promise such a reward in the first place.

We can see it in practice – there exists no big corporation that doesn't do something downright disgusting – animal cruelty, destroying the environment, spying on people and selling their personal data, ads targeted at children, cheating customers, abuse of employees. Take just the tech giants: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, EA and many others, all are burdened with progressively longer lists of unethical behavior.^[TGE] Non-technological corporations are no different.^[CUB] A corporation behaving like this isn't an exception, it is a rule. A businessman, a marketing person, these are the symbols of corruption, fraud and moral decline, the bad guys in every movie and novel, yet we let exactly these people run our society.

Capitalists abuse shortcut thinking and try to deceive people by promising freedom, however, this is not freedom for the people, but freedom for the markets – freedom to pursue profit without being restricted by ethics – which in practice means freedom to exploit others and to restrict the freedom of others, via wage slavery, resource control, media control, and other abuses of power. While people are told they have the freedom to choose their job – that if they're dissatisfied with working conditions, they can simply quit for another job – in practice a person is unable to find a job in which he is treated well, because as we've shown, companies must inevitably behave unethically and abuse workers. Therefore this freedom of work choice in practice turns to a freedom of a slave to choose their master.

They tell us in a free market we have the freedom to choose between different products, forcing the producers to try to compete by better quality of the products. We can see this is not always true just by looking at what we are offered e.g. in the world of technology: the only choice capitalism has given us is between Windows and Mac, both proprietary bloated spying locked-in abusive technology. We have the illusion of freedom of choice by being able to choose the brand, but we can't choose not to be abused – not even schools, hospitals, charities, and other institutions that should never be under the grasp of the market.

Most experts, even capitalists, agree that a completely unrestrained capitalism means a disaster^[UCD] and that we need at least some regulation of the market to assure such things as fairness of competition or protection of the customers. Since, as we said, companies have no conscience and only aim to make as much profit as possible by any means necessary, an unrestrained powerful corporation will quickly resort to unethical practice, destroying any competition and eventually endangering the whole society. To prevent this, we have mechanisms that are supposed to stand above companies and protect us – states and market laws.

However, the capitalist system we have created has quickly allowed corporations to evolve to hold such a power that they already far surpass the power of many states, to break free from the cage meant to contain the beasts. States and laws meant to protect us against corporations are becoming just their tools. There will soon be no one above the corporations and unrestrained capitalism is going to become the reality after all. In this sense, the science fiction stories about super intelligent machines that in pursuing a programmed goal get out of control and proceed to destroying our civilization are becoming reality just now, right in front of our eyes. The only difference is these machines are not made of metal and wires, but of humans themselves, organized in a destructive way.

Some people, even anarchists (namely individualists), blame the state for the emergence of monopolies, and say that without a state the market would be truly free and therefore somehow ethical. We strongly disagree with this. A truly free market means a truly unrestricted and unregulated market which we just showed to be disastrous for the society. Even though as anarchists we are against states, we see markets as a bigger threat, and we want to eliminate market before we eliminate states. States are actually the only remaining obstacle standing in the way of absolute power of corporations. Without a state, the strongest corporation would take its place in ruling over people. It would start creating its own laws and, unlike states which are at least supposed to work for the people and common good, a corporation, by definition and without hiding it, pursues only profit, so this rule would most likely be the biggest suffering mankind has ever experienced.

Rightists will further argue that competition, and by extension capitalism, is natural and simply works, and therefore we should support it. While the first part of the statement is correct, the conclusion doesn't follow.

Yes, competition is natural to us because of the natural process of evolution – or survival of the fittest – of which we as a species have been part since life appeared on Earth. It is natural to us as well as killing, starvation, racism and wars which all come with evolution. We see that something being natural doesn't at all mean it should be supported because it doesn't at all mean it is good for us as individuals. It also isn't true that the opposite of a thing that is natural is automatically unnatural – it is possible that both things are natural. For example, selfishness and violence are natural to us as well as altruism and peace. In this case which of the opposite sides shows in our behavior depends on which we decide to support.

This fact has been acknowledged by even the most prominent rightists, such as Hermann Göring, the second man of the Nazi party after Hitler. He said:^[HGW]

"The people don’t want war, but they can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

Evolution, and competing for the right to live, is a process of nature to search for the strongest genes – in which sense it works – but not for us, the individuals. Evolution doesn't aim to make us happy or not suffer, it makes us slaves, laboratory rats taking part in the greatest experiment in the universe. To us, evolution is just a cruel process. It doesn't make us happier, it makes us suffer. It doesn't make us free, it enslaves us by making it mandatory for us to constantly fight and compete.

Having a society based on competition, for example by implementing capitalism, works exactly in the same sense in which a jungle works to make the weak suffer and only the strong survive. The whole purpose of the idea of civilization, born out of this suffering, is to escape the jungle, the cruelty, the enslavement, the unpredictability. By pursuing civilization, we have consciously decided to pursue a social progress, which itself means creating a very unnatural but better environment in which no one – the strong, the weak, the working and non-working alike – aren't sentenced to death or suffering. Or at least, we'd like to get as close to as possible to this ideal.

Capitalism – a specific type of jungle – creates the illusion of working by achieving nowadays the no longer relevant kind of progress – technological progress – but fails to achieve practically any amount of the important kind of progress we have been aiming for – the social progress. In plain words, instead of rocks and sticks to fight each other with we now have technologically more advanced rocks and sticks to fight each other, but we are no more happier or less suffering than in the jungle. Instead of making the progress of abandoning the concept of a slave and its master we have simply replaced the master's whip with a gun and the slave's wooden tools with tools made of metal. Nowadays we are able to send a car around Mars or play one of many thousands hyper realistic video games in virtual reality or on our pocket devices, but do we really need it right now, for the price of still not being able to guarantee basic human needs, of giving up our morals, irreversibly destroying our environment and heading to a catastrophe?

Therefore it is crucial for us to understand that at this point when we, humans, have suffered through evolution until now to become by far the strongest species no longer threatened by others, evolution and competition is from now on only harmful to us. By continuing to take part in it we are paying the price of suffering for evolving further, which is completely unnecessary and doesn't bring any more benefit. We're buying something that's no longer useful to us.

Let's now stress that by abandoning evolution (improvement by competition), we would in no way be giving up our further progress and improvement, we would just choose different, non-harmful means, such as collaboration. Let's also note that, as stated above, we wouldn't be abandoning the concept of evolution and competition as such, just its application to society. They would still be perfectly fine to be used in entertainment (e.g. games), in science (e.g. evolutionary programming) etc. We simply argue that while the board game of Monopoly is a lot of fun and great to play with friends, it is unacceptably cruel to apply it to the real world and let capitalists play it with real human lives. (Did you know that Monopoly has been designed as a parody and critique of capitalism? And that there is a recent version of the game that promotes cheating as an inherent part of success in capitalism?)^[MOG]

One of the worst and most harmful prevailing conservative ideas is regarding the question of work. By work we mean an unpleasant activity that an individual is forced to do to be able to live, by which he becomes a de facto slave. Conservatives, but also just wide population in general, still believe that work (i.e. a kind of slavery) should nowadays and in the future be the prerequisite to life, because it has so far always been so. It is so deeply rooted in people's minds that we have created shortcut thinking patterns such as more jobs equals good and laziness equals wrong.

It is absolutely true that at the dawn of our civilization people needed to suffer working in order to survive and later in history this has still mostly been the case. With evolving technology less work was required to be done in order to survive, but the parallel evolution of social hierarchies has taken advantage of this established acceptance of work slavery and started transforming it more and more into slavery of many people to a few people. Nowadays this has come to an extreme – with our advanced technology, only a very small amount of work is actually required to be performed by humans in order to secure basic living for everyone, but people are required to work no less in order not to die. How is this so? Work has become a tool of capitalist slave masters, utilizing e.g. so called wage slavery. An extreme abuse of people is happening, people forced to work for majority of their lives in one way or another. All this extra unnecessary work people are required to do (so called bullshit jobs, such as advertisement or surveillance) capitalists use to further abuse the people doing the work, the slaves themselves! The false idea that a person has to work to such a degree in order to survive is being heavily advertised and spread by the propaganda of the slave masters (such as the current US president, Trump), who actually succeed in making the brainwashed slaves themselves support creation of more jobs (more slavery), when instead we, the people, should be demanding fewer jobs! We should demand such things as automation and universal basic income to make our lives less miserable.

Let us now focus on our idealism. We can say that true leftist extreme is by definition a paradise without suffering, while the rightist extreme is hell with everyone suffering except a negligible number of a few individuals who are temporarily at the top. Therefore there is no such thing as leaning too much to the left, it is always better to lean towards left more (see the chapter defining leftism and rightism to see why horseshoe theory is wrong) – and this is why we are idealists. A nonsensical argument often given to justify leaning towards right is that the leftist ideal is an unreachable utopia. Indeed, a utopia it is as any ideal, but as we have just written, being closer to a utopia is always better than being further away from it. Leaning towards utopia is always better than leaning towards dystopia.

Another argument against leftist utopias is that of a middle way – some (namely the centrists) say we need a balance of left and right, and with this we also disagree. While balance is better than the rightist extreme (although still not really great), balance is always unstable, posing the danger of slipping into the rightist dystopia. There is always a tendency in the society to start slipping towards and extreme of the principles it has chosen as its basis. We accept this fact and want to exploit it by choosing the extreme and the principles to be (truly) leftist, i.e. good.

Some people also argue that the effort of trying to achieve an ideal (e.g. communist) society is futile because it has never been established on a large scale in history (note that smaller scales have been implemented, see below). That is like arguing our effort to send a man to Mars is futile and that it's impossible because it hasn't yet happened in history, or that we shouldn't try to cure cancer because it is impossible for the same reason. We can see this argument fails in disproving the possibility of achieving our goal, it merely indicates it may be difficult, unlikely, or that we haven't yet reached the necessary level of progress that would allow it. Everything has to happen for the first time at some point – just as our journey to the Mars will happen with technological progress, the achievement of a society we describe here will come with social progress.

Let's add to this that the concepts of our ideal society, such as anarchism and voluntarism, are and have already been working on small to even large scales. In the context of the Internet and technology we are just now seeing a rise of large, world-wide decentralized, distributed and federated systems, networks and communities working without central authorities, such as the Fediverse (a large network of interconnected social networks), Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and systems based on distributed ledger (e.g. blockchain), peer-to-peer networks such as torrent protocols or PeerTube video streaming network, Tor network, free and open source software development and the Internet itself, by design having no central nodes or controlling authorities. Historically, there have been many communities working on the same principles, such as the land of Zomia, a community of about 100 million people living without government and social hierarchies.^[ZOM] The Free Territory of Ukraine is another famous example of historical anarchist community of about 7 million people that has worked on the principles of federation.^[FTU] An interested reader will be able to find a long sourced list of anarchist communities e.g. at Wikipedia. A lot of basic income experiments are currently being conducted, with positive results.^[BIE]

A great myth, nowadays coming mostly from the capitalist west, is that a fight is the only means to achieving a goal. We are told to accept that our whole life will be a fight and that we will have to fight for what we think is right. It is extremely important to realize that this is false. Fight is but a one way, a way of sometimes being able to achieve a quick success, but only a short term one, followed by downfall, revenge of the defeated, having negative long term consequences. Fight is usually one of the worst solutions, destructive to both sides, to which life forms resort only in case of emergency, when there is no other way. There are many other better solutions to issues and ways to achieving goals, such as a discussion, diplomacy, education, cooperation and non-cooperation, taking a stance, leading an example, and in many cases even just ignoring or running away from the issue can be better than fighting it. We, humans, the species that has evolved to no longer be endangered by other species, with our highly evolved technology and communication capabilities, practically no longer get to emergent situations in which there is no other option that fight. Fear and the necessity of fight is nowadays constructed and fueled by those in power who are dependent on the existence of such society, as admitted above in the quote by Hermann Göring – this is what we call a culture of fear, a term popularized by Barry Glassner. Fighting has by now become practically always the wrong way of solving issues. We think in this age fight itself is wrong and therefore we won't fight for this idea.

Another myth is that competition and a motive of profit are the only drives of progress. This is also completely false. People innovate naturally for many reasons – out of necessity, natural curiosity and boredom, seeking appreciation, experience and social contact, altruism, out of habit, pursuing higher good and a meaning of life. Many of the most innovative inventions were made by hobbyist and amateurs in their spare time, without the goal of any profit! For example the Linux free software operating system kernel that powers the Internet,^[LKC] or Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the world, written by volunteers. Retired people keep working even when they no longer have to, simply because a meaningful activity is what people want to do with their lives.

The Rules

We reject systems based on written law created and enforced by an authority (a government). Such a system is unacceptable for a great number of reasons and we, as anarchists, oppose it. For a detailed explanation of the reasons see e.g. the great, free-licensed text An Anarchist FAQ.^[AFQ] Instead of written laws created by authority our ideal society has moral laws.

But what are morals? Let us see morals simply as each individual's rules of behavior that lead to good. To the immediate question of what is good? we give an answer: good is simply our ideal society. We will also sometimes use the term ethics – the meaning is similar, but while morals are regarding individuals and may change depending on situation, ethics are more general rules regarding the whole society and are usually constant. For example, we say that capitalism is unethical in general, and the act of collecting valuable items may and may not be immoral, depending on the circumstances and motives of the individual who does it – if the intent is to hoard wealth, the behavior is immoral, because that leads to capitalism, but it would not be immoral e.g. as a part of creating a public museum.

Aren't morals subjective? Largely they are definitely not – even if different cultures in history showed different morals, any such civilization always formed a large group of people sharing the same morals (e.g. based on Christianity). We are intending to do nothing different here, just make the group the whole world.

Our morals aren't any alien rules that people would have to relearn with great effort, they are actually very similar to existing morals stemming from Christianity and other religions. This is so because ideas of many religions are mostly socialist and leftist (while unfortunately the politics around religion is usually rightist, e.g. religious wars). For example the teaching of Jesus includes non-violence, non-competition and sharing ("turn the other cheek", "if someone throws stone at you, throw back also but with bread"), caring about others ("love thy neighbour") and many other socialist ideas. Buddhism advocates not doing harm, not taking or injuring any life, not lying, and other similar life conducts.^[BUD] Sikhs traditionally run community kitchens (so called langar, which can be found in most major cities) where anyone who comes is served food for free, without the distinction of religion, gender or ethnicity.^[LAN] Islam also proclaims charity, tolerance, forgiveness and kindness (yes, it really does).^[ISL] So even though nowadays these old morals are on decline, they have been and are a deep part of our mentality already. We are merely improving and updating them, and trying to revert their decline.

Morals of our society are defined simply by our common goal together with the laws of logic. Any individual knowing and agreeing on the simple common goal and having the ability to reason (which the absolute majority of a more advanced society has) is able to deduce morals, and verify the correctness of morals they learn from others. Note a similarity with distributed systems resistant to altering by an authority, such as distributed cryptocurrency systems based on blockchain. In our system of morals the rules cannot be altered by any authority because there is no outside authority making laws for the people, the laws come from the inside, from people themselves, and as such we have a true democracy. This eliminates the issue of laws being manipulated by the powerful few – something unfortunately seen constantly happening in society so far.

It indeed has to be said that predicting consequences of actions in society is difficult and sometimes impossible and so people may sometimes be unable to deduce what is right and wrong, or may disagree on it. We acknowledge this, mistakes will happen. The important fact is that in our ideal society people are not interested in enforcing their opinions and agenda, but to truly look for the truth and are completely open to being proven wrong, admitting own errors and changing their opinions, as that is in their own interest. So there are the best conditions for the truth to be found and mistakes be minimized.

The Goal

It needs to be remembered that our ideal society is unreachable. This is however no reason to despair – we intentionally create this ideal just as mathematicians create ideal models that are very useful even though they can never exactly match reality. This ideal model of society sets us a direction and allows its comparison to various aspects of the real world society. Our goal is to get as close as possible to our ideal society.

Continuing with mathematics, formal theories are built on top of axioms – simple statements that we take as true, without having to, or even being able to be proven. The fundamental idea of our theory – our axiom – is in this regard the same. It is a simple and general statement of a common goal shared by all supporters of our proposed society. It is this statement:

Living beings can feel joy or suffering. We, as living beings, want all living beings (including ourselves) to equally feel as much joy as possible, and to suffer as little as possible.

Or, in other words, to all according to their needs.

Note that this is a leftist goal because it seeks to benefit all living beings, equally. A rightist version of the goal could be formulated as well, stating:

I, as a living being, want myself (or a small group I am a part of) to feel as much joy as possible, and to suffer as little suffering as possible, even on the detriment of others.

Our leftist goal gives everyone a guarantee (as good as practically possible) of never sinking to the bottom, because the members of society will always care for every other being to be happy and not to suffer, and will even sacrifice a little of their own happiness to eliminate the suffering of others. The rightist goal is, on the other hand, a kind of lottery – if you're lucky enough to be born superior or simply by pure chance you may get to experience much more joy, but if not, you will sink to the bottom and suffer – all or nothing.

We believe that when it comes to the matter of life, death and suffering of all living, the vast majority of people will simply choose certainty before lottery. It is also a known fact that the expected value of a typical lottery is negative, i.e. mathematics objectively advices not to play.^[LOT] The lotteries we see in capitalism fall under this kind of lottery – in the real world only an extremely small number of individuals are successful. Therefore, logically, at least the vast majority of the unsuccessful should be against this lottery, and on the grounds of probability everyone should be against it. We hope to further justify the leftist goal even more by showing here it is possible to get close.

We are pure and idealist left, opposing both rightist and pseudo leftist ideas (note the wording – we are against ideas, not people). Unlike the right and pseudo left we do not see ourselves as fighting to win a battle against the other sides, we do not wish wrong to those we oppose, we do not seek to punish them or take revenge on them. That would be a primitive goal dooming us to just repeating history over and over again. We seek a higher goal. We seek exactly to eliminate this kind of predatory and war mentality – not to win a war, but to eliminate the war. Not to oppress those we oppose, but to eliminate any and all oppression of anyone. By this we achieve our goal.

We want a society in which its members are guaranteed some basics rights which don't have to be earned and cannot be lost. For example, in the current society we've always had a de facto guaranteed right to one of the very basic needs: air. No one has to deserve air, and air cannot be taken away from anyone, not even the worst criminals (at least in the more civilized countries that no longer have death penalty). We believe this right is good and want to work to further extending the same rights to other essential things, such as simply living in itself and having individual freedom.

As leftists we are for social equality of all members of the society in the widest sense, i.e. all humans and by extension also animals and all that lives and can feel suffering.

Let us stress that we are only talking about social equality, not other kinds of equality, because this work is only concerned with a social framework. We don't at all advocate e.g. physical or intellectual equality, i.e. we don't advocate political correctness, or hiding the fact that there are differences between different races of people, or the two genders, or making people physically equal. We take it as given that people are different and we embrace the differences and diversity. What we say is that as a society we want to prevent any suffering, of everyone, indiscriminately. Be it an important scientist, a criminal or a mentally disabled person unable to achieve anything significant – all of them can suffer the same, and we want to eliminate any suffering.

But if we allow pointing out physical and intellectual differences between people and groups of people, such as making "sexist" or "racist" jokes, without any censorship, won't it lead to discrimination? Will it not negatively affect the idea of equality of all people? The answer to this is very important to understand. In the spirit of looking for long term solutions, addressing the root causes rather than curing the symptoms, we simply want to establish that what is wrong is not pointing out the differences, it is the discrimination (creating social hierarchies) what is immoral. In our society without competition, there is no incentive to discriminate, and so political incorrectness won't lead to discrimination. If people accept our thinking, they will naturally stop discriminating because it will no longer even make sense. By introducing concepts such as political correctness we would be putting in place unnecessary restriction on freedom, which is unacceptable.

Some say that this is unrealistic – that if we tell people racism is okay in speech but not in real life, they will never be able to separate the two. To this we object! The current society proves the argument wrong already – we e.g. allow the worst kinds of violence in art, such as movies and video games, and despite some voices saying otherwise, in practice we see that people are able to separate entertainment media and real life, especially those with enough education and proper upbringing, which we support and make an essential priority. In the same spirit we don't at all mind the concepts that we oppose in the social framework – e.g. capitalism, competition and violence – in other areas such as art, speech, science and entertainment.

Talking about living beings and life, we may also soon begin to ask what exactly classifies as life? As it's been indicated, we connect life to suffering, which is our concern. Therefore for our purposes we will not be using the biological definition of life – this definition serves biologists well, but as will be shown wouldn't be good for us.

We will rather use a different definition – behavior that is, especially in the area of suffering, similar to that of ours, of humans, we consider life. Note that this is a fuzzy definition, a one that doesn't give a binary yes or no answer to the question of what is life. It rather gives us a real number value, a degree to which something is alive. Such fuzzy definitions go along well with our ideas of moral laws, not creating a black and white polarized sets, as is the case e.g. with laws written and enforced by governments, which need to give binary verdicts such as guilty or not guilty. With this definition of life we are able to consider e.g. bacteria alive only to a very small degree (because their behavior is very dissimilar to ours), and consider it acceptable to kill bacteria in most cases. It makes vegans able to eat plants, because these don't show signs of suffering similar to ours. It also allows us to e.g. consider artificial intelligence progressively more alive as it gets more and more human-like – once it starts to show the ability to suffer as much as we do, we consider it alive and apply our principles to it as we do to ourselves.

An important observation showing a big mistake of many movements is regarding their focus on either the ends or the means. When a group sets for itself a goal, it usually proceeds to specifying the means by which to achieve it, often not realizing the danger of over time refocusing on the means instead, forgetting about the goal, allowing the goal to slowly shift – or most importantly be shifted – somewhere else completely. Without keeping the original goal in mind at all times the movement degrades, loses its direction but by inertia keeps its momentum and becomes a dangerous out of control boulder rolling over the society. This is how movements starting with equality as their goal end up as fascists. Therefore we need to remember to always focus on the goal, not the means, and specify the goal carefully and correctly – means will always follow, and their justification can always be evaluated against the goal.

How do we practically focus on the goal first? One way is to make ourselves reminded of it constantly, keeping it visible at all times so that any deviation from it is immediately clear and apparent, hits us in the face and tells us to stop. For this reason the goal should be part of the name of the movement.

There is a great example of two similar movements, one focusing on the goal, the other on the means – we are of course talking about the free software movement and the open source movement, respectively. While the free software movement has been around for much longer, it still firmly holds to its original cause – freedom of software users – and manages to achieve it. The open source movement, on the other hand, has intentionally ditched the word freedom and refocused on the means – a source code that is open. While the open source initiative keeps a definition of open source software that is virtually the same as that of free software and so in theory both should be virtually the same, just by this mental shift from the goal to the means we have seen a rapid drift aways from the ethics and a loss of freedom in the open source world, replacing the goal of freedom with profit of companies, happening by playing tricks on the users, calling software that depends on proprietary platforms open, and even starting to call programs and licenses that don't pass the official definition of open as open, leading to confusion and users who no longer neither know nor care about the way to protect their freedom. Prominent examples include the Android operating system or Microsoft buying itself the open source branding. (Many so called open source supporters no longer make difference between truly open source programs and programs whose source is available without proper usage rights. They very often even lack the completely essential knowledge to distinguish between them.)

Capitalism is yet another example of a system focusing on the means – the capital, wealth, profit. By making capital the center point it doesn't make any promise of leading to happiness or any other kind of good for the society. And indeed, practice follows exactly. Arbitrary justifications of capitalism such as the invisible hand have shown to be completely untrue, as markets soon requires huge regulations to prevent monopolies, cartels, unethical behavior towards consumers, other competitors, workers etc.^[UCD]

Regarding the FSF, we've recently also seen a growing criticism of it from their own ranks. However, this criticism isn't caused by the same kind of issue, but different ones. For example, we hear critics say (and we agree) that the FSF is using non-free licenses for their essays and videos, i.e. while being extremely strict about software freedom, they happily betray these ideas when it comes to works different from software and so violate the related concept of free culture (not just by ignoring it, but by trying to change and misinterpret it).^[RAN] But let's notice that the organization is named the Free Software Foundation – free culture isn't mentioned, it has not been their focus, and so, just as we've been explaining, they aren't likely to achieve or contribute very much to this cause.

Another extremely common and undesirable mistake regarding goal definitions, likely stemming from capitalist thinking, is instead of proclaiming "we want to achieve A" saying "we want to fight B". This is faulty because:

• Firstly, saying we want to fight an undesirable phenomenon – be it racism, poverty, inequality or anything else – implies our goal is the fight, not elimination of the phenomenon. Our interest then lies, paradoxically but by definition, in not eliminating the phenomenon, but keeping it existing so that we can constantly keep fighting it. One common and infamous example of this paradox is e.g. an anti-virus company, which of course has an interest in the existence of computer viruses.
• Secondly, by such formulation we are again refocusing our attention on the means – fighting – and in addition means that are wrong, as fight often implies violence, which we, as pacifists, want to avoid, and which should come as a last possible option, if at all.

This perhaps can seem like a time wasting playing with words, but let's not forget that we want to base our effort on rationality and keep our approach close to a scientific one. The definition of our goal is what this approach will stand on and it is an absolutely essential part of our effort, so in it, similarly as e.g. in the definition of axioms in mathematics, we need to try to be extremely precise.

Freedom is something promised practically by any ideology, and in itself the word doesn't say much, as there is no such thing as a general freedom. Capitalists, for example, are for the freedom of market, which means a freedom to oppress others. We are not for this freedom – we want freedom of individuals that will allow them to live a life, experience joy and no suffering – for example the freedom to live without working. By advocating individual freedom we do not advocate the freedom of the individual to do anything they want to, because that would of course allow them to do things that take away freedom of others. We are for example not for the freedom to do business, to kill people etc. We should also repeat these limitations of freedom we won't enforce using violence, but by non-violent means. However, we aim to restrict the freedom of people as little as possible, to the absolute minimum necessary degree.

One of the freedoms implied by this individual freedom, and so a freedom we very much support, is an absolute freedom of information in general. We are against any intellectual property laws (as we are against private property in general, and against monopoly^[CMO] laws), i.e. we want all information to be in the public domain, available and uncensored, just as it has already been the case e.g. with mathematical formulas. These causes are all in accordance with our ideas, and are also supported by many groups that are not associated with us. Reasons for supporting some of these causes are given by people like Richard Stallman^[FRS] or Lawrence Lessig (in his book Free Culture).^[FRC]

We are additionally against any markets, money and private property (though we are not against personal property, i.e. possession). Unconditional exchange can still happen, but we see it as immoral to arbitrarily make a person deserve something they need, which in our society of non-competitive and selfless people we equate to what they want. That is we are against demanding pay (which a person may not be able to afford) and discrimination between people based on what they can offer. If the seller needs something in return for their goods, they have the same right to simply take it. We also believe that supply and demand markets will always tend to lead to competition and capitalism.

Finally, let's remember that even if our goal may be extremely difficult to achieve – probably much more than any other social change in the history – it will be enough to get there just once, because the goal society is stable – unlike societies based on competition, conflict and balance, in which tension is always present, and will sooner or later lead to its collapse.

The Means

As we have stated, we are always and foremost focused on the goal, the means will always follow, and they have to always be subjected to reevaluation against the goal. As soon as the means are seen to not lead to the goal or go against it, we have to abandon them.

Furthermore we highly, and in some cases exclusively, prefer means that are themselves in accordance with the goal – choosing means that are in conflict with the goal, for example war in pursuance of peace, is wrong because by that we are legitimizing what we are trying to delegitimize.

The road towards peace is that of love, and so we love all that lives, even those who hurt us or that we disagree with. Even if we sometimes get into conflicts with people and negative emotions appear, we rationally choose to love them as humans and living beings. In real life we may out of convenience choose to say we hate someone, but that just means we hate their opinions, the way they act or similar attributes, but we never hate a person as such. The concept of loving everyone is important to remember.

We are generally against violent revolutions, which are favored by the pseudo left. One great issue with the revolutional approach, and that is the social inertia and disagreement about when to stop. If we choose violence as our modus operandi, then firstly we have to agree when exactly to stop, which will cause great disagreement and even if we somehow agree, there will be great disagreement about whether we have already reached that point as measuring the amount of our success is impossible to do precisely. Keep in mind that because of the nature of our goal, being an ideal model, it will most likely never be reached, so we can't simply say we'll stop using illegitimate means when we have reached the goal. And even if we somehow succeed to agree we should stop using the illegitimate means at some point, by the force of inertia and habit some would keep still using them as it is impossible to completely revert behavior of a big group of people in an instant – so we would now have a group of people that we ourselves have created that stands against our goal.

For these reasons and others (such as revolution simply being a violent change that inevitably brings unnecessary suffering) we choose the evolutionary approach, or – to avoid confusion with biological evolution which we showed to be undesired – a slow, peaceful change.

With this in mind we have to realize that we're required to think far beyond the scope of our own lifetime. This is difficult to do, but it is ultimately what we have to do and what we predict people should be able to do more and more as a result of the intellectual and social progress of mankind – in important decisions relying on our intellect and rationality, not instincts and emotion, abandoning selfishness and pursuing greater long-term good for as many people as possible, including those in the future. The greatest minds and visionaries of history, foreshadowing what an advanced intellect looks like, already show this kind of thinking far beyond their lifetime. In this we want to be the same and by it we are one of the first humans to show this advancement in intellect, which should, also thanks to us, become common in the future. We must not do this for any reward, or expect any but knowing we sincerely do good and our lives have an important meaning. Nevertheless, if things go well, we may still live to see and enjoy some early fruit of our effort even for ourselves.

So, our methods of operation are non-violent, because we believe our proposed system is superior to other systems and if you have something superior to offer, you don't need to force it. We are not even tempted to force our ideas because by our own rules enforcing acceptance of anything automatically means we've lost. We wish to eliminate the distortions (such as propaganda) and by it make it clear our way is the best. Methods we can use are for example:

• rational discussion, developing and proving ideas, convincing people on the grounds of logic and by providing scientific evidence,
• non-cooperation, refusal to support or take part in what we oppose – such as capitalism, consumerism, proprietary software – as much as possible,
• education, making others see the real causes of issues and their solutions, revealing corruption, spreading awareness, teaching critical thinking, revealing populism, deception etc.,
• leading an example, showing our ideas work and are better than the status quo,
• protests by non-violent means, e.g. strikes,
• working against the current system, e.g. by whistleblowing or developing tools for breaking censorship,
• working for our system, e.g. by creating public domain works, free software, helping charities,
• simply being good, spreading non-violent mood, encouraging civilized and friendly behavior, collaboration and establishing our values.

Note that what would be unacceptable to do to humans – e.g. starve them to death – is generally not unacceptable to do to companies, because as we've shown, companies are not like humans at all, and we don't consider them alive – and of course, they are what we seek to eliminate. To us, it is therefore not immoral to steal from companies or otherwise work towards their elimination and towards the benefit of people at large.

We furthermore prefer means that are good in long term before those that achieve initially better results, but bring more evil in the future, as we are looking into the future, to create a stable society, to solve problems slowly but once and for all.

We can try to make an analogy (of course keeping in mind all dangers of analogies) between means to solving social issues and means to solving e.g. health issues. A drug (a small dose of poison) can be an effective short term solution to health problems of an individual, but it just as well comes with worse effect in long term, especially when it gets overused. If a person is depressed because of circumstances of their life, a dose of heroin will likely make the depression go away for a few hours, but it needn't be said this leads to a disastrous life in a matter of months. A better, long term solution is to try to solve the cause of the depression, to try to fix the person's life circumstances, even if that is not as pleasing in the immediate. This extreme example is here to demonstrate what kind of solutions we prefer – the long term ones. To us capitalism is like heroin – it should never be in wide use or a basis for solving issues. Its only acceptable use should be under strictly controlled condition in an isolated laboratory.

Therefore, very importantly, we are for example against any use of censorship – that is hiding ideas, media and opinions from the public, even partially. Censorship is a short term solution, bad in the long run, additionally in conflict with the freedom of information and sharing, and typically requiring some kind of censoring authority, which goes against anarchism. Censoring an idea is easy, and so it is a tempting way of making it go away for a while (and a nice way for temporary politicians to achieve quick results), but it is not the correct way of dealing with an erroneous idea. The correct way is proving the idea false. Censoring an idea also psychologically leads people to firstly get interested in it as in forbidden fruit, and secondly see it as more likely true, because if it could be disproved, why would it need to be censored? Finally, if censorship is legitimized as an acceptable practice, it becomes a weapon of propaganda and of authorities against the people, countless examples of which we don't need to point out here.

And so even if we are against Nazism, we will defend the right of Nazis to be heard and will even help them be heard, so that their ideas can be submitted to rational evaluation, publicly refuted and rejected.

As supporters of absolute information freedom and opponents of the concept of intellectual property we are against imposing restrictions on the use of our educational material, such as this very text. The FSF, in our opinion wrongly, uses ND (no derivative) restrictions on their materials to prevent others from removing or changing the ideas they spread.^[GND] This is in our view wrong because we don't want to create gospel. (Another argument stating that no derivative licenses prevent altering someone's opinions is also invalid – incorrect attribution of statements is simply lying, which is firstly not meant to be an issue addressed by copyright, and secondly if someone's goal is to lie, they can always avoid infringing on copyright.) We simply spread truth we have discover via our effort so that others can see it and don't have to needlessly waste the same effort. The truth we spread can be verified by logic (which will typically require much smaller effort than discovering it, just as mathematical proofs are typically easier to check than to discover). So if anyone modifies our statement to an untrue one, it will simply become a verifiable falsehood and sane people (whom our proposed society produces) will be able to reveal this.

We are also against censorship of any kind of pornography or other media capturing crime (not necessarily today, but eventually, as a part of the described slow change). Besides the above given arguments against censorship in general, we don't believe that watching a footage of crime should be considered a crime, that would be just another unnecessary restriction of freedom, which we oppose. The supposed justification of the opposite is that allowing illegal pornography increases demand of it and encourage producers to commit more crimes. This is firstly about as much true as saying that USA prohibition decreased the demand of alcohol – it didn't, it just gave rise to mafia – and secondly, demand requires a market, and since we are ultimately against markets, market demand can't rise in our world, because market doesn't exist.

Regarding non-violence and pacifism, a very common question asked is: if the other side uses violence, how can we protect ourselves? A lot has been written about this topic, so we won't go into much detail, but we have seen non-violence working in practice against violence many times in the history, e.g. with Gandhi, Martin Luther King or the Velvet Revolution. We therefore know that non-violence works, at least against some kinds of violence.

In our ideal model of the society violence has been completely abolished by everyone, but as rationalists we have to also consider the fact that in practice there will probably always exist cases of violence against which non-violence may be completely ineffective. Let's imagine for example a lunatic, simply unable to think rationally, going on a killing spree, to kill as many people as possible. How would we deal with this?

In our perfect, ideal and unreachable society that doesn't use violence at all, people would view this the same way they would view a natural catastrophe, such as an earthquake or asteroid impact, against which they are completely powerless, and they would simply accept this as a disaster. They could run away and hide, but would generally let the lunatic do what he does – wander around the world and kill people, until he dies of old age. The society would be hurt, but would survive. The people who would have died wouldn't have died in vain – by not defending themselves they would have helped keep violence an illegitimate means to rational people, keeping the society safe from its abuse.

Considering such advanced mentality is probably beyond our reach even in far future, we accept that some minimum amount of violence or force will probably always exist as a means of defense, and we can tolerate this fact, as long as it really is the absolute minimum and the mentality regarding violence is correct. We will never consider any use of violence a victory, but a loss, just maybe a lesser evil. We will never celebrate anything achieved by violence. In the case of the dangerous lunatic killing people, in a world close to the ideal, we would likely immobilize him without hurting him or causing him suffering, and put him in a place where he could not continue to further kill people – keeping in mind this would not be a prison! We wouldn't seek to punish the person, just to prevent killing of more people.

Yes, with non-violence we often get hurt, but so is the case with using violence, and in the end with just living in the real world. Not hitting back is what stops further violence and allows better means of solving conflicts, such as a discussion, to take place.

Some critics of non-violence argue that use of violence can be justified because it can prevent greater violence from happening, and that can be true, but only in the short term. We think further – our goal is to delegitimize violence as such in order to prevent all possible violence in the far future, and so we choose non-violence even if it means we get hurt more in the scope of near future.

Critics can also be heard saying that it is simply not possible to make people change to become completely non-violent. They say violence is naturally in us, and will stay in us for a very long time to come, because evolution of species is a very slow process. To this we have two answers:

1. As we already mentioned, violent behavior is as natural in us as is peaceful behavior, and which one shows is determined by which one is fueled. Therefore what is natural to us depends greatly on the environment. Both peaceful and violent natures have been given to us by evolution because we have experienced different environments in which we needed both. Therefore if we create an environment that doesn't fuel violence, violence simply won't show.
2. Even evolutional change in behavior has been shown to be extremely fast under certain conditions, e.g. selective breeding (which in our society could be occurring naturally, at least in part, by females choosing to have children with men who share their moral values). With some effort, wild foxes that are completely hostile to humans change to friendly pets in just a few generations.^[ECD]

People have no incentive to fight a system that is truly and verifiably designed for and working for their good, as they would be fighting against their own good. Violence in such world doesn't make sense, which is why in our society violence and resistance can come only from lunatics who are unable to think clearly.

We acknowledge that at the present day there are many individuals, such as radical far right activists, for whom it is too late and who are practically impossible to be convinced to change. However, we are looking far beyond the time of this generation, the time when these individuals will long be gone. At the current time we aim to influence just some people, who will further go on to influencing others and next generations by adopting some of our ideas and passing them to their own children.

Upbringing (and not just by parents but by environment at large) is an extremely powerful force determining the nature of an individual. Note that again, in the spirit of non-violence, we are in no way talking about forceful upbringing, as that very often leads to achieving the exact opposite – the child later radicalizing against the ideas they were force fed – not talking about causing suffering to the child. We are talking about upbringing by leading an example and growing up in the right environment. For example, even though by evolution nakedness is the natural thing to people, they do the unnatural and all wear clothes, because they simply grew up among people who all wear clothes. Wearing clothes is not a force fed idea, it is a standard in our society, and we see practically no people rebelling against this standard. In the same sense we want our moral values, such as non-violence or opposing competition, to become the same standard.

Even though we're non-violent and non-revolutionary, we are still strict. We want to steer the wheel slowly but firmly.

Similarly with other issues, by the nature of our slow change approach, for some time we will have to tolerate and sometimes even keep doing things we disagree with – e.g. tolerate centralized governments. We may participate in the system, vote and try to make it better by passing laws that will do less harm, while in the meantime working on getting rid of the system. We may sometimes use free licenses for our software and art, even though we fundamentally disagree with the concept of a license. On the other hand, if it is moral from our point of view, it is good and desirable to voluntarily make rapid and significant changes, for example to never use proprietary software, to never eat meat, to actively work against global warming and so on.

Keep in mind that even though we are strictly against companies, that is organizations whose goal is profit, we are not against organizations in general! We support formation of non-profit organizations and nowadays see them as a great way to contribute to society in the framework of the current system. We know non-profits currently suffer from imperfections, such as some similarities to companies, but their goal is absolutely correct (and correctly reflected in the name non-profit), and practice indeed shows they usually do much more good than harm, which is only small and very tolerable. These small imperfections will be fixed as our cause is advanced.

It is clear by now capitalism and competition have infected all vital parts of our civilization, and so it is impossible to abandon them at once without doing an immense unacceptable harm of immediately destroying the basis of the society without having an alternative ready. Our first focus has to be on curing small parts of our society and establishing the foundations for the alternative.

For example, nowadays practically every single piece of an intellectual work – even hobbyist, educational and by intent non-commercial – is protected by some kind of intellectual property law, which is advertised by the propaganda as preventing exploitation of the author's work, which may be partially true, but at the same time, which is no longer part of this advertisement, preventing use of the work for the benefit of society – remixing and improving – the kind of use our culture has been dependent on since its birth until the recent copyright maximalism has appeared.^[FRC] By the same logic used to justify copyright we could state that a murder is justified because it prevents the victim from dying of cancer. The very worst part is however that the propaganda is successful in making the authors themselves believe the partially censored truth, making them thoughtlessly support the laws and stick the all rights reserved to anything they create. As a result, in this society practically every hobbyist and even many charities sworn to helping the society at wide will want to keep their copyright, letting business further into areas where it should never belong, killing the public domain, the idea of completely free sharing and business-free mentality. We think that in the near future it is crucial to achieve a society in which this kind of thinking is changed and in which there are at least some places again completely free of business.

How to achieve this? We need to educate, spread awareness, lead an example and support change of laws. People must first understand the issue – e.g. the issue of proprietary code, hence basic education in programming – then see the solution – education about free software – and finally demand and achieve the change. So if we teach about such things as free culture, free software, universal basic income and other socialist concepts, and show working examples, the perception of these issues will become wider and people may start demanding change of laws, for example abolishing automatic copyright or reducing its term and scope. This will lead to more public domain and free as in freedom works, its bigger role in society, and ultimately the mentioned curing of one part of the society.

We need to constantly keep working on changing the mentality caused by shortcut thinking and wrong associations from old times. Stress that creating jobs is wrong, we need to eliminate jobs, automate everything and strive for all people to lose their jobs so that they can do voluntary meaningful activities. It is extremely important to realize and accept that life must never be something to be earned, as well as lack of suffering. One of our short time goals is therefore to implement universal, unconditional basic income.

Most importantly, we need to teach people to simply think – the important skill of critical thinking – to be able to educate themselves, be resistant to populism, lies and falsehoods, and be creative in further pursuing the goal. A common man has to become an independently thinking man.

So, in conclusion, how can you, the reader, help? What specific steps can you make right now if you have, at least partially, identified with our ideas? In accordance to these same ideas we will not give you a simple authoritative answer, we don't want to give orders. We simply ask you to think and let yourself be influenced, verify the logic yourself and let the ideas be present with you, and as result in your future actions. In some time, your life decisions will start to become subject to the questions we taught you to ask. Perhaps if you are an artist, you will decide to share some of your art freely and dedicate it to the public domain. Perhaps if there is a political party advocating some of our goals, such as universal basic income, you will decide to give it your vote. Perhaps when passing a homeless man on the street, this time you won't look away but will give him some money or buy him food. Perhaps you will decide not to support corporations if you don't have to and you will rather play a free software video game than buying a proprietary one, or you will even consider switching to a lower paying job which serves the society better than your current job. Perhaps you will decide to share this text with other people. Helping make the world a truly great place to live is the best cause we can ever dedicate our lives to.

Possible transition scenario

At this moment there is no specific plan for the transition from current society towards the ideal. That would be a topic for another text. The transition towards ideal is a separate topic from the description of the ideal. However, here we may quickly try to foreshadow one of the possible paths to show the plausibility of our goal.

At first our idea will exist in the minds of few individuals who will be living it, serving mostly as a philosophy of their personal life conduct, but also with the goal of slowly spreading it among more and more individuals, before bigger groups form. These will later evolve into a specific movement and a significant force with a non-negligible impact on the society. As our ways will show to be the best, our ideas will gain more and more strength and will slowly start to permeate the thinking of people and politics.

Thanks to this people will start to demand more socialism and will be voting for representatives who will implement universal basic income, progressive tax, universal healthcare and education, relaxing of intellectual property laws etc. Once this process starts, it will be accelerating itself – as e.g. better education leads to better understanding of our principles and a demand for yet more education. We will begin to abandon unnecessary production and labor. Much of human effort, currently spent on marketing, satisfying consumerism and such, will become available for voluntary work on creating a better living environment for everyone, because wage slavery will be coming to its end. With most people having guaranteed living conditions without stress crime will practically disappear.

A process of peacefully reversing capitalism will take place: corporations will be starving as people's preference will shift towards smaller businesses until all business just seizes to exist and production becomes based on voluntary work. Technology will become truly helpful to the people and much more efficient without burdens posed by consumerism and "protection" of intellectual property. The role of states will be decreasing with morals replacing written laws. Fewer laws will be written on paper as they will become obsolete. Armies will become only a symbolic thing of folklore until they slowly dissolve completely.

People's mentality will be changing along, which will become reflected in art and language. This will contribute to raising new generations that will naturally be collaborative rather than competitive, without the need for discrimination and hierarchy.

Appendix A: Our Views About Technology

Modern technology suffers immensely from the power of corporations that run the world, as we have already said. Here is what we imagine technology should look like in a better world, and which we therefore seek and prefer to use. As modern technology is dominated by computers and software, these will be our focus now, but the general ideas apply to all kinds of technology.

Our foremost priority is to use and create exclusively free software^FRS. This is not only because of the common reasons of security and its general better quality but also because of our support of information freedom and opposition to capitalism and centralized control. To us, the best form of free software is completely unburdened public domain free software (i.e. public domain source code) because of our mentioned opposition to the idea of intellectual property. Our definition of free software includes all parts of the software, i.e. even non-functional data. With this definition we are closer to Debian than the FSF.^[DVG]

Secondly, when the software is free, we prefer so called suckless,^[SUC] KISS, minimal, good enough, reusable software, following at least some of the principles of the Unix philosophy, because we are concerned with accessibility and efficiency. Let us stress that this applies to all kinds of technology, even that such as video games. For any technology we highly support hackability, transparency, maintainability, portability and the ability to be easily repaired. A piece of software should be maintained by as few programmers as possible and understandable by as many programmers as possible, be highly reusable and have as few dependencies as possible in order to survive and last for as long as possible, in order to not waste effort on reinventing wheels as we're used to in the current proprietary industry. We believe that this kind of technology is the natural kind and will come when the unnecessary bloat resulting from capitalism no longer encumbers it. This doesn't mean we can't create complex technology, just that it shouldn't be more complex than it needs to be to help people.

For these reasons, if we are presented with the choice, we prefer to avoid capitalist inventions that don't adhere to the above, such as C++, Java, OOP in general, heavyweight IDEs and platforms etc. This is only a preference, not a strict rejection. We however strictly reject languages such as C# that are either proprietary or de facto owned by a corporation.

Furthermore, in the spirit of anarchism, we are for autonomy and independence of technology users, i.e. decentralization and distribution of computer systems and the capability of working offline. We oppose modern capitalist trends going against this, such as clouds, DRM or software as a service (SaaS, or more correctly SaaSS – service as a software substitute). We are not against servers and centralized technology per se, e.g. archives or game servers, as long as they don't create social hierarchies, don't take away the freedom of users and don't endanger our society in other ways. This applies not only to software, we think more technological autonomy and decentralization is needed, not only to prevent abuse, but also to prevent disastrous scenarios of central node failures, such as blackouts, to which capitalism exposes us nowadays (consider e.g. the fact that Microsoft has the power to shut down any country by simply remotely disabling Windows computers in it, thanks to the universal backdoor that is by design present in Windows^([WBD])). People should be allowed and encouraged to make their own electricity, tools, food etc.

Appendix B: Our Views About Existing Movements and Organizations

We are eternally grateful for what Richard Stallman (RMS) and his Free Software Foundation (FSF) have achieved in showing the malicious nature of proprietary software, defining free software, promoting and supporting it, showing it not only works but mostly even outperforms proprietary software, and mainly strongly holding to strict ethics as the main drive beyond the movement.

We, however, have a word of criticism about the FSF as well. For example, despite being extremely strict about free software, they do not support the related concept of free culture. The FSF states that non-functional data (e.g. art assets in video game) that are part of software don't have to be free, i.e. are an exception from the four essential freedoms. They routinely use non-free licenses, such as CC-BY-ND, for the media they create (e.g. videos of talks or texts). Their GNU free documentation license (GFDL) allows to include invariant (no derivative) sections,^[GFN] making the licensed work not free, despite the name. GNU Verbatim Copying License is another non-free license from GNU. Furthermore their preference of copyleft is something we tolerate as successful means of preventing harm by corporations, but do not fully endorse, as copyleft is based on restriction via copyright, which is something we don't support. The Gnu General Public License (GPL) itself is a free license, but it is also a long, complex legal text, existing in many variants (GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, AGPL etc.) and with many conditions that don't make forking and sharing very easy in practice. We highly prefer public domain, or at least permissive licenses (MIT etc.) that make sharing and reuse easier.

Similarly we are very grateful for what Lawrence Lessig and his Creative Commons (CC) have achieved in helping generalize and spread the ideas of free software to also include culture and art, making it easy to practice free culture and subsequently even helping free cultural licenses get somewhat into the mainstream.

However, we have to express criticism on the address of Lessig and CC too. Lessig says in his book Free Culture that he is ultimately for the concept of intellectual property. Additionally the book Free Culture,^[FRC] the bible of free culture, is not free-licensed (it has the ND restriction) and so is not part of free culture itself. At the very least it looks extremely dishonest to betray an idea by the very book that promotes it! Additionally we have to express sadness about the fact that CC offers non-free licenses – NC and ND – and that they are widely confused for free licenses. CC correctly inform on their website these licenses are not free, but not in a way that would prevent the confusion. There are additionally issues regarding the licenses themselves – e.g. the CC0 waiver, supposed to dedicate a work into public domain, intentionally doesn't waive any intellectual property rights besides copyright (such as patents or trademarks) in order to make it possible to make profit off of the work.^[CNP] But by this, confusingly, the waiver actually sometimes does not achieve public domain (which is defined as a body of works free of any intellectual property, not just copyright). This complicates use e.g. for software (and there is currently no alternative for dedicating software to public domain), and generally goes against the idea of creating a work that stands outside of the business sphere. It seems that Creative Commons are not serious about free culture.

We recommend reading Nina Paley's RANTIFESTO^[RAN] which voices similar criticism. There are unfortunately no movements that would strictly and seriously promote free software, free hardware and free culture at the same time.

We are also very grateful to Gandhi for his non-violent movement's contribution to society, and to others that followed him such as Martin Luther King. We extremely value that Gandhi not only taught us the principles of non-violence, but also demonstrated that non-violence is a legitimate and effective tool, practically usable on large scale. We however don't identify with all Gandhi's values – Gandhi was, unlike us, not an anarchist, as he e.g. supported strict legislative restrictions of freedom, e.g. alcohol prohibition.^[GAN]

The Open Source movement is (from historical point of view) a relatively recent fork of the Free Software movement, and as such still carries on some good of it, though from the start it has taken a very wrong direction of abandoning the interest of people (ethics) and replacing it with business interests, which quickly lead to its corruption, and so we do not support the Open Source movement, though as free software supporters we often get to collaborate with them. Open Source definitely did help in creating and supporting many great free software projects, but the bad it does is already starting to surpass the good. Due to refocusing from the goal (ethics) on the means (open source) companies like Microsoft are able to abuse the open source brand and slowly shift the goal towards their own interests (which is fight against free software). Microsoft is already seen trying to become the owner and defining force of open source, by buying GitHub, infiltrating Linux development, spreading its propaganda ("Microsoft loves Linux") and so on. The movement itself, having lost the sense of the original goal, already starts to accept software violating free software definition and even their own official OSI definition of open source. The open source supporters, such as Linus Torvalds, don't share our concerns about proprietary software, and are often even supporting it. We want to have nothing to do with this.

In previous chapters we have explained why movements such as feminism, LGBT and Antifa are not leftist movements but pseudo leftist – because of their means of operation and at least questionable goals – and so we do not support them, even though we usually support the idea that may have been present during their birth, i.e. equality of genders and sexual orientations and opposition to fascism.

We have more sympathy for organizations such as PETA (who are not a movement, but a non-profit organization). PETA aren't aiming to gain rights for themselves, but solely for others – in this case animals – and that in an honest way. The purpose of their sometimes vocal and loud behavior is, similarly to that of the FSF, attracting attention for the cause, not spreading fear and pride of superiority, as is the case with feminists and LGBT members.

We fully support veganism and ethical vegetarianism, as these are completely in accordance with our values.

References and Notes

• [AFC]: Criticism has been expressed e.g. by Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest living anarchists and scientists, in the article Noam Chomsky: Antifa is a 'major gift to the right', by Maya Oppenheim, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/noam-chomsky-antifa-major-gift-right-wing-anti-fascist-alt-left-a7906406.html (accessed on 2019-08-23): "When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is. That's quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organising, and serious and constructive activism."
• [AFQ]: An Anarchist FAQ, version 13.1, by The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq.
• [BIE]: The Town With No Poverty, by Evelyn L. Forget, 2001: "overall hospitalizations, and specifically hospitalizations for accidents and injuries and mental health diagnoses, declined for MINCOME subjects relative to the comparison group." The remarkable thing that happens to poor kids when you give their parents a little money, by Roberto A. Ferdman for www.washingtonpost.com, 2015: "Relationship between spouses tended to improve as a result […] Parents tended to drink less alcohol […] Some of the families, given the boost, even moved to areas with slightly better census tracts in terms of both income and education." Further references and a list of basic income pilots can be found at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots.
• [BUD]: The Ideas and Meditative Practices of Early Buddhism, by E. J. Brill, 1988. Page 12 discusses so called noble eightfold path: "right speech: not lying", "right conduct: not killing or injuring", "right livelihood: living from begging, […] not possessing more than is strictly necessary".
• [CAP]: Behavior of corporations has been shown to meet the diagnosis criteria for psychopathic behavior in the paper Corporation as Psychopath, by Martin Brueckner, in Encyclopedia of Corporate Social Responsibility, 2013.
• [CMO]: Copyrights and patents are by definition monopoly granted by law, giving exclusive rights on use to the author or inventor, prohibiting practically any use by competition without the permission of the copyright/patent holder. This is commonly acknowledged, e.g. Lessig: "The drug companies that produced these life-saving mixes enjoy at least a twenty-year monopoly for their inventions."^[FRC]
• [CNH]: This observation has been made by many others, e.g. from John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath: "The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it."
• [CNP]: CC0 1.0 Universal, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.txt: "No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document."
• [COC]: Code of conduct (COC) is a declaration of how software developers should interact and it has recently become an infamous weapon for forcefully pushing the LGBT and feminist propaganda in free software development. Consider e.g. the following quote: "We managed to remove Brendan Eich, Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. One white male homophobe, one white male tone deaf freak and sociopath and one white male misogynist. COC is our weapon. COC is how we cancel people who should have never be in any society in the first place." (https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12536#p88240, archived at https://archive.li/WGz6h#90%). COCs are anti-free speech and hurt free software development (i.e. a true leftist cause) by pushing important developers out of projects based on their political opinions or behavior (see e.g. the famous case of Linus Torvalds being forced to leave the development of his own project, Linux) and preventing rejection of incompetent developers who are under the protection of the COC. The most prominent COC is probably the Contributor Covenant, used e.g. by Linux, Go and Ruby on Rails, made by Coraline Ada Ehmke, a transgender LGBT activist.
• [CUB]: Countless examples of unethical behavior don't need much pointing out, but some examples include the symbol of capitalism, Coca-Cola (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Coca-Cola, accessed on 2019-08-23), cigarette companies (Chesterfield, Camels, Marlboro) falsely advertising smoking as healthy and even targeting children, Nestlé claiming and selling water during drought and without legal rights (https://www.latimes.com/food/sns-dailymeal-1864756-drink-nestle-extracting-water-illegally-drought-california-122817-20171228-story.html, accessed on 2019-12-21) or General Motors devastating the city of Flint by closing their factories, leaving thousands of people unemployed (portrayed in Michael Moore's 1998 documentary Roger & Me). Companies are frequently against protection of employees by unions, see e.g. the article Delta told its workers to buy video games instead of unionizing (https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/5/10/18564745/delta-anti-union-video-game-poster, accessed on 2019-08-24): "The seemingly union-busting tactics are cringeworthy, but they’re not unusual." The Delta posters read: "Union dues cost around $700 a year. A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the Union."
• [DEC]: Nancy Pelosi, a high member of the Democratic Party, has publicly said at the CNN town hall in 2017: "We're capitalists, and that's just the way it is." According to Gallup inc. polls in 2018 about a half (47%) of Democrat supporters prefer capitalism to socialism.
• [DVG]: Debian free software standards (https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html#not_just_code, accessed on 2019-08-23): "we apply our standards of freedom to all parts of all software in Debian. This includes computer programs, documentation, images, sounds, etc.", vs GNU free software definition (https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.en.html#non-functional-data, accessed on 2019-08-23): "We don't insist on the free license criteria for non-functional data."
• [ECD]: Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment, by Lyudmila N. Trut, 1999: "In the sixth generation bred for tameness [the foxes] are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs."
• [FES]: It is not uncommon to hear feminists openly talk about wanting to surpass men, e.g. "Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.", a quote by Timothy Leary. Though this has been criticized by prominent feminists themselves, such as Betty Friedan, the movement's attitude didn't change.
• [FRC]: Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig, 2004, http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf.
• [FRS]: What is free sotware?, by the GNU project, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html, accessed on 2019-08-20.
• [FTU]: Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, by Peter Marshall, 1992, page 473: "He took the initiative in organizing an area of some four hundred square miles with a rough population of seven million into an autonomous region […] Anarchists were in charge of a large territory, one of the few examples of anarchy in action on a large scale in modern history."
• [GAN]: In a TV interview for Fox Movietone News from 30 April 1931 Gandhi confirmed he was for complete prohibition in new India. An Anarchist FAQ^[AFQ] also says in the section A.3.7 Are there religious anarchists?: "we must stress that Gandhi was not an anarchist".
• [GFN]: from the GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.3, section 4. MODIFICATIONS (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html#section4): "You must […] preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text and in their titles."
• [GND]: Licenses for Works stating a Viewpoint, on the GNU website, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OpinionLicenses, accessed on 2019-08-23.
• [GNM]: The GNU Manifesto, by Richard Stallman, 1985, https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html.
• [HGW]: Interview with Göring during the Nuremberg Trials, 18 April 1946.
• [ISL]: The Qur'an: An Encyclopedia, by Taylor & Francis, 2006 – page 416: "the righteous is he who […] gives of his money, in spite of loving it, to the near of kin, the orphans, the needy, the wayfarers and the beggars, and for the freeing of slaves", page 214: "In addition to the countless references to forgiveness throughout the Qur’an, there are numerous examples of the practice of it in the life of the Prophet, who is celebrated [as the 'perfect human']", page 415: "Of all the human virtues, the Qur’an insists most frequently and most urgently on benevolence to the poor, the needy, the stranger, the slave and the prisoner. This is expressed in the form of compulsory alms-giving (zakat) and, more importantly, in the form of voluntary charity (saclaqa)." Muslim's Character, translated by Mufti A. H. Usmani, 2004 – chapter 14: "Hardness be Replied with Softness. […] He should consider overlooking of the errors of the wrongdoers as a kind of gratitude to Allah", chapter 15: "[Islam] has advised [its followers] to treat others kindly, to act righteously, to help their kinsmen and to do all kinds of good and virtuous deeds".
• [LAN]: Food that Builds Community: The Sikh Langar in Canada, by Michel Desjardins and Ellen Desjardins, 2009. Also on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langar_(Sikhism).
• [LKC]: Linux is one of the most (if not the most) important pieces of software in history, it powers most Internet servers and a lot of other computers. Its creator, Linus Torvalds, started the project as a hobby, without the goal of profit, and made it free as in freedom.^[FRS] In his book Just for Fun he writes: "The most important part of the project was to just figure out what this machine did and have fun with it […] Everybody knew I wasn’t making any money on Linux." In a famous e-mail from the beginnings of the project he states: "I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)."
• [LOT]: The computed negative expected value can be found e.g. in the Business Insider article The Mega Millions jackpot is over $500 million — we did the math to see if it's worth buying a ticket, by Andy Kiersz, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/mega-millions-lottery-jackpot-expected-value-2018-3.
• [LCU]: The Learning Curve, by F. E. Ritter and L. J. Schooler, 2001, 10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/01480-7.
• [MCM]: A very essential text criticizing capitalism is e.g. the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848.
• [MHD]: Is Mental Health Declining in the U.S.?, by Edmund S. Higgins, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-mental-health-declining-in-the-u-s/: "Suicide rates per 100,000 people have increased to a 30-year high […] Disability awards for mental disorders have dramatically increased since 1980 […] They found that the toll of mental disorders had grown in the past two decades […] Over the past two decades mental illness has become the second most common cause of disability in the U.S."
• [MOG]: Monopoly’s Inventor: The Progressive Who Didn’t Pass ‘Go’, by Mary Pilon for www.nytimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/business/behind-monopoly-an-inventor-who-didnt-pass-go.html, accessed on 2019-08-19: "[Elizabeth Magie] designed the game as a protest against the big monopolists of her time." Monopoly Game: Cheaters Edition, released in 2018, comes with such promotions as "Complete a cheat to get a reward, but fail a cheat and pay the consequences!"
• [POV]: How Long Will It Take to Lift One Billion People Out of Poverty?, by Martin Ravallion, 2013: "At the time of this writing (in 2012), the available data indicate that 1.2 billion people in the world live in poverty." Investment and Development Will Secure the Rights of the Child, by Dr. Ernest C. Madu: "About half of the world’s 2.2 billion children live in poverty, and 300 million go to bed hungry each night."
• [RAN]: RANTIFESTO, by Nina Paley, 2011, https://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/04/rantifesto/, accessed on 2019-08-23.
• [SHE]: shitexpress, https://www.shitexpress.com/, accessed on 2019-08-19.
• [SUC]: suckless, software that sucks less, https://suckless.org/, accessed on 2019-08-23.
• [TGE]: Richard Stallman aggregates a sourced list of sins of tech corporations on his website https://stallman.org/ under the section What's bad about (accessed on 2019-08-20). These include spying, censorship, patent trolling, worker abuse and tax avoidance by companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Intel and others. Techrights website wiki at http://techrights.org/wiki (accessed on 2019-08-20) offers similar summaries under the section TechWRONGS, e.g. http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/List_of_Microsoft_Sins.
• [UCD]: The evils of unregulated capitalism, by Joseph Stiglitz (American economist, Nobel Prize laureate, member of the capitalist^[DEC] Democratic party), 2011, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117714241429793.html (accessed on 2019-08-23): "I [hoped] the financial crisis would teach Americans [about] the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government."
• [WBD]: Universal backdoor, a great security vulnerability, is present in Windows operating systems under the name automatic software updates. Microsoft doesn't hide this fact, it is descibed in the terms and conditions of use: "By accepting this agreement, you agree to receive these types of automatic updates without any additional notice." (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/Retail/Windows/10/UseTerms_Retail_Windows_10_English.htm, accessed on 2019-09-17).
• [WDI]: An Economy for the 99%: It's time to build a human economy that benefits everyone, not just the privileged few, by Deborah Hardoon, 2017.
• [WRL]: Right-wing politics and Left-wing politics at Wikipedia, accessed on 2019-08-24, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics.
• [ZOM]: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott, 2009 – from preface: "[Zomia] is an expanse of 2.5 million square kilometers containing about one hundred million minority peoples [who] have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states. […] Virtually everything about these people’s livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length. […] Not so very long ago […] self-governing peoples were the great majority of humankind."

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pandoc -s --toc --pdf-engine=pdflatex --variable=documentclass:article
--variable=geometry:left=32mm --variable=geometry:right=32mm
--top-level-division=section
-o non-competitive\ society.pdf non-competitive\ society.html