Thought You’d Never Ask

Much if not most (I’m tempted to say all) of our thinking about authority has been perverted by indelible imprints of authoritarian upbringing, education, and incessant social reinforcement. We’re all brainwashed, literally, and it started before we could even talk, when our parents first negated and violated our wills, and sometimes our rights and bodies,…

Getting Free From Authority

Authority is a story we tell each other. That’s all it is, no more. Telling a story does not make it true. Telling it again and again does not make a story more true with the telling. Repetition automatically creates credibility, but this effect is a cognitive foible that we need to be aware of…

Authority as Excuse for Violence and Domination: The Insanity of Authority

Note: This is a rough excerpt from one of the chapters of my upcoming book. Authority is used to excuse power exercised for no good reason or for bad reasons, which is worlds apart from authority implied by knowing what should be done and the competence to achieve it. Yet we call both by the…

Power: Lust Or Addiction?

After six decades of life, I still can’t believe how eagerly people bend over backward to deny the obvious and swallow whale-sized lies just so they can cling to myths of the need and merit of following “leaders”. For all the supposed sophistication of “developed” societies, when it comes to running a society, we think…

True Growth un-Economy

What if you could walk into a store, pick up any and every item that you needed, and walk out without being charged a cent — all above-board, legal, fair, and the socially accepted norm? What if you had the leisure and security to use your time doing things that you enjoy or even that…

Musing On Rights

(Excerpted from my post Musing On Rights at Millard’s Blog) I don’t regard rights. By that I in no way mean that intend to or in fact violate rights, but rather that I think talking about human affairs in terms of rights is an inferior way to deal with human relations. First, rights presume that…

And You Thought the Titanic Was a Disaster…

“We got ownership totally backwards.” When I utter those words, especially to libertarians and anarchists, the reactions can be downright comical. It’s not that no one articulates good points — they do, once they get past initial face-palms and realize not only that I’m serious but my points are well-thought. The funny thing is, instead…