When it comes to politics, it seems there are only two words to define who is out there anymore:

Sheeple — The average citizen, happily voting away their rights, ignoring the imperial expansion of the State, accepting all new controls over their lives in order to think they are safer and richer.

Tinfoil Hats — The average conspiracy theorist, ready to bury his family in a lead-lined bunker with years of bottled water, canned rations and gas masks.

I don’t believe I’ve ever used the term “sheeple” before but a casual blogsearch shows dozens if not hundreds of sites using the term. I know I’ve been called a Tinfoil Hat wearer, mostly because of my lack of trust in paper money, stock markets, invsetment markets and certain government activity. Yet I am a regular Joe in most ways — I shop at the community grocery stores, wear normal clothing, drive a Toyota, live in a nice home, work with normal customers, spend a few days a week in my church community and have many non-church friends. I go to restaurants, shows and travel for fun and information. I don’t even use foil in my house (but not for any wacko health reasons, I just prefer plastic wrap).

What is the term for the person who doesn’t vote mainstream (or even for the usual third party suspects), doesn’t live beyond their means, doesn’t believe in buying cheap junk but does believe in buying high quality goods that last a lifetime, doesn’t hide from their legal tax requirements and doesn’t feel the need to hide their opinions from everyone else (and is even willing to help discuss and debate them openly)?

I don’t think my opinions are so far out there, not compared to the real tinfoil hat community. The basis of my life today revolves around a few simple points:

1. I don’t trust paper money because I don’t trust those who print it and continue to print it. I believe that wealth can last a lifetime and also be passed down generation to generation without becoming worthless. Paper money has never held its value very long, but history is quickly forgotten.

2. I don’t trust a politician to do what they promise, and I believe that most promises will not help myself, my household, my community or my country. I believe that voluntary cooperation tends to be the best way to get things done, and that people generally do right when they have the opportunity to. I think many criminals are born out of the loss of opportunity due to ancient government programs that were meant to help them, but instead lead to inequity and financial harm.

3. I don’t trust the educators anymore, as all I hear about in the news is their desire to earn more money rather than increase the quality of their products (the students’ educations). I believe the best education is one that a family pays for themselves, directly, and I also believe our country would be much more competitive on an international level if some families had to work hard so the next generation can attend higher education. I also believe that spiritual groups (”religious groups”) can do a great job educating those who can’t afford to pay, sometimes a better job than private education can offer.

4. I believe that we have a right to our property as long as we mix our labor with it. The idea that massive corporations will own the entire world only can be upheld if government is there to allow that corporation to exist. In an anarcho-capitalist “utopia” (non-existant of course) I don’t believe that someone can control and protect their land without being a part of making that land useful and better.

5. In my anarcho-capitalist community, I would openly accept a contract to take care of streets and even some basic policing (to merely watch for outsiders). As long as all property is private and not public, there is no reason for outsiders to be wandering the land near my home — my land. I would not want the policing group to do anything against the members of the community unless one member decided to harm another member or their property. I also believe in smaller communities (a few hundred) rather than larger ones (thousands) where the smaller communities can work hard to keep the costs of the streets down. I don’t see a need for public money to be spent on larger roads and highways as I believe there can be a very healthy competition for private roads — and I think they’d be cheaper and better maintained than what we have today.

5. Lastly, I believe the Internet has given us more opportunity for doing good without government force than ever before. I can accept the debate topic that government might have been needed for the past thousands of years, yet I still believe there was almost always too much of it. Now that the Internet allows billions of people to openly communicate their needs, their wishes, their fears and their successes, I think the need for a regulating body has been removed.

I’m looking for a new title (or even an old one that I missed) to classify the peaceful and honest member of a community who doesn’t walk with the “sheeple” nor the “tinfoil hat” crowd.

I welcome you to debate and discuss this article here.

I’ve been giving much thought to the situations the mass media and the mass mindthink have placed into our heads — things that we consider “normal” for individuals to perform. The initial push for my pondering came out of the police action in Iraq — focusing on Saddam and some people’s view of the need for violence against the country.

In recent weeks I’ve spent more time trying to watch TV news and read the mainstream newspapers and I’ve realized that most of us easily attribute great evils and great good works to individuals, yet it is rare that an individual really can accomplish great things on their own.

Today on slashdot I acquired a link to an interesting exhibit in the UK: 1001 things that Muslims have brought to society. This is a good website to peruse through, and I’d love to see the exhibit for myself. It also gave me great insight into this continuing drive to attributing great works to just one individual.

I’m half Polish, so I’ve always been aware of Copernicus as being one of the first individuals to fight the State and offer the opinion that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The site alludes to the notion that a Muslim by the name of Ibn Al-Shatir predicted the theory centuries before Copernicus, and even the Wikipedia entry on Al-Shatir offers a theory that Copernicus might have utilized Al-Shatir’s mathematics to prove his case without crediting the Muslim mathematician.

Between Copernicus and Hussein I see so much to ponder. Can a single person be responsible for great works or great evil? I’m starting to think the answer is no. For me this is a wonderful revelation, and I’m interested in anyone’s recommendations of books and writings that talk about the subject. My thoughts against copyright and the protection of anyone’s creations fit in nicely with the idea that we all borrow, steal and adapt the works of others to things we create ourselves. I’m no communist who believes that all works belong to all of humanity — but I do believe that anyone is free to use their labor as they please as long as they don’t harm the physical body or physical property of another individual. You’re free to spend your work mimicing mine (copy my painting, re-record my songs, retype my writings), and I believe you shouldn’t be forced to credit me. Yet as we see with the situation between Copernicus and Al-Shatir, historians won’t leave any evil deed unnoticed — it makes sense to credit the works of others when you create something yourself.

In fact, the more I think about situations like this, I realize that offensive war against a group of people can never be justified — we can never truly know which individuals performed what evil deeds, and we also have no real idea why those deeds were performed and if they were truly evil. In many situations, governments have attacked masses of people for the evil deeds of one man (in actuality, a group of men using one as the figurehead). Looking back on these situations, the governments who took the offensive may have been part of the reason the past evil deeds were done — and at the time the deeds were not evil but protected by what was considered a right to defend themselves before another evil deed could be performed.

Where does this leave us? I think it is important to focus on the idea that no individual really does that much by themselves — there are always previous successes and failures of others that leads us to the serendipity of creation. Many times we don’t even realize what our muse might have been. The same is true in battle, though. War is the ultimate form of creation, although it is creation with a negative value — destruction. From all of the history of the past, it is obvious that destruction is counterproductive for mankind and for almost every individual. In the long run, no one is protected by destruction, but we start to believe that we are.

Nothing one man does can affect the globe as we seem to think it does. Not Saddam, not Adolf, not Genghis, not even Jesus. There are always others that have come before or during the rise of the great creator (/destroyer) that have to be considered before we should lay blame or attribute credit to the final destruction or creation.

Discuss this article here.