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20130617

Don't Be Evil When Liberty is At Stake

"Do the right thing: don't be evil. Honesty and Integrity in all we do. Our business practices are beyond reproach. We make money by doing good things." — Google Core Values

Reactionary anarchism is partially motivated by negative liberty - the freedom from coercion. By participating on their side, a person's freedom to be / freedom to exercise one's potential - the epitome of positive liberty - is severely limited to attending meetings and participating in direct action.

If anyone chooses to study society by social intercourse with it, then one is suspected of being a traitor.

However, revolutionaries who exercise negative liberty using the same means of oppression as their foes (coercion through violence) whilst calling it liberty cannot be distinguished from their foes.

In order for any revolution to be enacted with the least amount of harm and succeed, the revolutionary must be committed to non-violent confrontation and constructive dialogue with free market society.

The reason why I choose "free market" rather than "bourgeois" is because the latter term was co-opted by the socialists, whose experiment with government resulted in the failed Soviet regime due to corruption of the communist elites who replaced the aristocrats and the Czarist regime.

In this context, "free market" refers to the epitome of both positive and negative liberty, which is free market capitalism. Even though there are regulations in place to control the financial market, one is still free to exercise his or her full potential to realize financial success.

Yet there will always be professional jealousy to motivate the purveyors of negative liberty to find the weaknesses of their business rivals, and who will pervert positive liberty by exercising the deep dark recesses of their potential in unexpected ways.

Thus, I find the antidote to this to be Google's maxim: don't be evil.

Caveat: note that the maxim provided still allows one to commit a lesser evil i.e. exposing Internet users who use multiple IDs to "manufacture" composite personas as part of their trolling activity, and in essence, "killing" fake people who only exist online.

Another example is when a policeman uses his taser to stop a suicidal person with a knife.

In business, the truth is often created in a way to maximize profits, usually by omitting anything that will negate the key selling points. This is why alternative health supplements rarely reach universal acceptance because all you need is one doctor to declare that medication is more effective, and mass media may use that declaration of medical opinion as statement of fact to erase support.

Reference:

Don't be evil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil


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