The Illusion of Intellectual Property
And the mentally ill that steal from us with that illusion of theirs.
PSYCHOPATHY
Normal humans, most all of your neighbors, and no doubt yourself, hold onto, more or less, a steady balance, within your mental capacities.
We all have a full range of emotional desires and fears to want more and less of this or that thing, and although we also have the capacity to go beyond acting upon those desires and fears outside of the bounds of socially acceptable norms, we choose not to, we restrain ourselves from acting like animals, like mentally unstable humans.
In particular, the social norms of don’t steal, of what is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours, that my private personal and business matters are not available to you unless I want them to be, and that yours are private as well and not available to me unless you want them to be.
It’s not complicated.
Everyone knows the rules of the road and how to appropriately navigate them in civil society, without needing a road map.
Every fully functional teenager has a firm grasp on these global societal norms. And everyone can quickly identify and agree if someone is stepping out of bounds and starts acting like a lunatic.
For example, none of us wake up in the morning, fearing of some imminent disaster, feel the need to dictate to our neighbors how they must handle their personal or business affairs or demand of them the details of their affairs, what they spend their money on, from whom they receive money, where they are going, or what they are discussing with their associates, friends, and family, etc. etc.
Yet, there is a small segment of the population that is afflicted with this sort of mental illness.
There is a small segment of the population that does demand of everyone around them to provide this sort of information to them, under the banner of “or else bad things might happen to us all and this is the only way to stop those bad things from happening, it’s the price to pay for safety, and a functioning society” they proclaim to us.
Sadly, these types of people simply have an inability to operate within the norms of civil society. These types of people are plain and simply, mentally unstable.
Imagine the kind of lunatic neighbor that goes around knocking on your front door one sunny Sunday morning, demanding that you provide him all of your financial dealings, all of your conversational history, all of your whereabouts, because if you don’t provide this information, there could be some devastating terrorist attack, a disease outbreak, or who knows, maybe even something worse, like climate change that causes all of the coastlines of your favorite country to be gobbled up by rising sea levels.
Obviously providing such information to your neighbor would be an absolutely insane request from a mentally ill person that needs professional help. No able minded person would have any reason to believe such madness, nor go along with it, save for a few kind hearts out of empathy and pity for the poor broken mindless soul.
Every one of us with a functioning brain would simply respond to such a neighbor with “I appreciate your concern, but no thank you”. And that would be that.
It would be a strange and funny dinner party story, but that is about it.
In the same way a mentally ill street bum might run up to you and ramble on about some impending doom and to repent or else. It might be a little scary and unnerving for a moment, but that’s about it and you simply remind yourself to stay away from that insane person.
But unfortunately for you, and I, and for all of us, the mental illness does not stop there, dear ladies and gentleman.
For there are those neighbors among us whom are severely mentally impaired and will take it another step further proclaiming that “sir I am sorry to have to do this, but if you don’t provide this “voluntary” information, I am going to need to let your bank know of your unneighborly terrorist like activities and have them close your bank account, and explain to your employer that you are not helping us combat terrorism, nor the spread of viral outbreaks, and you are aiding in climate change, and you will be surly fired by your employer for your lack of compliance in helping protect our neighborhood.”
When viewed wholistically for what it is, we are dealing with a sever mental disorder, my friends.
We are dealing, specifically, with a clinical type of pathological anxiety, where these people do not have the mental capacity to apply appropriate levels of fear responses to what are unrealistic improbable fearful scenarios.
We are dealing with people that have hyperexcitability of fear circuits in their brains. And unfortunately for all of us, in our social norms of live and let live, that fear drives these maniacs into positions of power, where they are able to actualize their fear based insanity upon the entire global neighborhood.
DIAGNOSIS
According to Wikipedia:
Psychopathology is the study of mental illness. It includes the signs and symptoms of all mental disorders. The field includes abnormal cognition, maladaptive behavior, and experiences which differ according to social norms. This discipline is an in-depth look into symptoms, behaviors, causes, course, development, categorization, treatments, strategies, and more.
And from the American Psychological Association, from the article entitled From normal fear to pathological anxiety is the following excerpt:
… pathological anxiety may develop from adaptive fear states. Fear responses … are functionally adaptive behavioral and perceptual responses elicited during danger to facilitate appropriate defensive responses that can reduce danger or injury (e.g., escape and avoidance) … Pathological anxiety is conceptualized as an exaggerated fear state in which hyperexcitability of fear circuits … is expressed as hypervigilance and increased behavioral responsivity to fearful stimuli … Hyperexcitability in fear circuits is expressed as pathological anxiety that is manifested in the various anxiety disorders.
I am reminded of the old adage from Franklin D. Roosevelt, that the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself, which came about during his presidential inauguration speech in March of 1933, along the backdrop of 24,000 bank closures in the heart of the Great Depression. The full context of that famous line is enlightening:
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Under normal societal circumstances, where private property is protected and upheld as the highest ideal, these severely mentally ill people would have no power, they would not be able to capture control of our private property. But we are not living in normal societal circumstances.
We are, unfortunately, living in clown world.
And in clown world, private property takes a back seat to things like public property, and intellectual property, which spawn evils like imminent domain and patent law.
In a healthy society, the shared belief in private property is the only belief required to build civil society.
But when the sickness creeps in, when the mentally unstable, drowning in fear, take the helm, in order to take away private property, new beliefs must be created to usurp those private property rights, and intellectual property rights are a very effective tool for these mentally ill.
Indeed “public property” is another great tool of the mentally challenged, but we’ll save that for another discussion and focus here on intellectual property or “IP”.
By creating this new class of property, IP, the mentally ill have slowly and steadily chipped away at the property that you and I, and our ancestors have worked our entire lives to take rightful ownership of.
The creation of this mythological creature the “intellectual property right” is much like the creation of the mythological creature the “fractional reserve bank” wherein the former creatures slowly creep in the front door of your life to censor and permission every action you might want to take, including where and how you spend your money, while the latter slowly creeps in the back door to loot your monetary savings of every single penny, and both of them in the name of “safety” and “the price to pay for civil society”.
We’ve addressed the purchase power dynamics of fractional banking numerous times but it is time to address this other creature, the intellectual property rights monster, whereby you must believe in it or else there will be no innovation and nobody will be able to make money from their ideas, according to the calculations of the mentally ill.
Lol.
Intellectualized property rights are the mechanism that the mentally ill utilize to enforce their fearful policies upon their global neighborhood.
To understand this mechanism of censorship and permissioned gatekeeping with intellectual property rights, in order to implement the fearful policies of the mentally ill, we need to take a surprising detour to understand the root of this mechanism, and it starts with a small seed, that begins it’s life as a whisper within our minds, what we all understand as “an idea”.
IDEAS
Ideas are a peculiar thing. And there peculiarity has, from time to time, offered devastating outcomes for humanity over a number of millennia.
Once again, we seem to find ourselves caught up in their peculiarity, harnessed by the mentally ill for their benefit, at the expense of the masses, all of us.
It is high time we turn the tide, once more.
In some ways ideas are very much like any other property that an individual might own, in that ideas, like property, are scarce, not everybody has them, good ideas, just like good property, are hard to come by.
Ideas are also like property in that they can be copied and thus if enough work is put in, they can go from being a scarcity, in short supply, to an abundance, as more are produced with time.
However, ideas are very much not like property in a one particular way, in that the creators use of an idea in no way impinges on someone else’s use of that same idea.
This is a very unusual characteristic when compared to property. And it is a subtle difference. But pay attention for the devil is indeed in this subtle distinction.
For example, suppose first you have an idea to build a house in a certain particular way, and you draw up the particular architectural designs of the house, and you then build the house in accordance with those particular designs. Next, suppose someone else, your neighbor for example, sees your new home, likes the design of the new home you built, and decides to copy your idea and modifies his own house according to your design.
The use of your design by your neighbor in no way reduced your ability to enjoy the utility of the house that you built.
However, if that same neighbor instead of using your design idea, decided to use your house that you built, well that certainly would reduce your ability to enjoy the house that you built.
So ideas have a similarity to property in that they can be scarce or abundant depending on the amount of time we spend working on them, but they are also very much not like property, in that if someone else uses your same house design idea to build their own house, the use of your idea by someone else has absolutely no impact on your ability to continue to use your idea to build your own house.
In other words, ideas are unique in that any number of people can use the same idea without any loss of utility to the original creator, or any loss of utility to any other user of the idea.
This confusion about how an idea is like property in some ways, without considering how it is not like property in other ways, lends itself to the flawed belief that all ideas can and should be characterized with the same legal and social attributes of property that is rightfully owned by individuals.
From this erroneous logic, the mentally ill have concluded that ideas should therefore be given a label similar to property, and thus “intellectual property” or “IP” was born, with all the same legal attributes as private property, that IP should have “rights” attached to them in the same way that ordinary private property has rights attached to it.
And once you begin down this logically flawed path, and start believing in these mythical “IP rights”, once you start believing in the notion that ideas are the same as property, that a house design should have the same legal distinction as a house, that the creator of a house design idea has the same rights of ownership and control over his idea as the creator of a house has rights of ownership and control over the house he built, you will quickly find yourself in the ninth circle of Dante’s inferno, in the heart of darkness, getting mandated to lock yourself in your home, and inject experimental drugs into your arms, for your safety, you stupid fucking peasant.
PROGNOSIS
There has been many a man whom has spent his lifetime determining the birthplace of property rights, deciphering whether they are inalienable, whether they were granted by a Creator, by some intelligent design, or whether they are simply a fiction we tell ourselves.
Ultimately, it truly does not matter how, where, or when property rights came about.
What only matters is that you and your neighbors, that humanity, understands that the cornerstone of civil-ization is the maintenance of the shared notion that what is yours is yours and what is mine is mine, that the things you build with your hands and your time is rightfully yours to own, and that which I build with mine is rightfully mine, and that we agree to this, as human beings existing in a place of scarce resources, in a place of limited time to procure what we want and produce from it what we may.
If there is one truth in the continued development and prosperity, and abundance of humanity, it is that property rights are good, and that not believing in them, in other words, believing in theft, is bad.
There is nothing else needed to know or to enforce, in order to maintain human flourishing, here on this good green earth within the warm embracing glow of our Sun, amongst the galactic cold expanse of the milky way that we spiral through.
Our only enemy in the growth of ourselves in the coming millennia is that of ignorance, the pathological evil that pervades us imperfect men. And from time to time as we further develop our minds and our tools, we hit upon stumbling blocks.
Not unlike what was for some multiple millennia the misconception of our heavenly bodies, that we were the center of it all. In time, with a gaining of education through more and more sophisticated tools we common men learnt what the great prophets had screamed from the mountain tops, that we were but a speck of dust far from center, in an ocean of heavenly bodies.
And here we are once again, at the precipice of new knowledge, that ideas are indeed not property, and therefore they must hold no place to be treated as such, that the notion of intellectual property rights is a long standing scourge of humanity for many a millennia as well. It is damned time we end this ignorance for once and for all, because from it spills all manner of inconsistency and chaos, and evil, from men of well meaning and best intentions.
Money is an idea.
Speech is an idea.
Labor is an idea.
Tens of thousands of patents and trademarks and all fashion of intellectualized properties are but ideas.
Let us let these ideas run freely, as free as our imaginations, as freely as the blood that courses our bodies, as freely as a summer breeze or a hurricanes gale. We owe nothing to each other but the courtesy and low time preference to see these ideas run free.
We certainly do not owe each other support in the monopolization and imprisonment of these ideas. What right have you to take some strangers hard earned work and use it to protect your ideas!
You have no such authority lest the stranger offer it, consensually.
And yet you demand it!?
To impose a tax, a coercive theft of my property, to pay for trigger-men and judges and juries to prosecute me should I take and use your idea?!
This is not in accordance with civility.
This is in accordance with beastiality, with subhuman behavior, this is thievery. This is mental illness, psychopathological anxiety.
Whether you call them patents, or trademarks or copyrights, or legal tender laws, or regulatory licensure, they are all the same, for they are coercively enforced intellectualized theft.
And unless and until you see this for what it is, you will not know freedom in this life.
Rise up, take back those ideas, and use them, share them, robinhood them back to humanity, back from the mentally ill. We need no longer pacify their sickness. Let freedom ring, my brothers and sisters.
Cheers!
Great piece. IP is a scam.