Our world has become so much about how much worse other people are making things, and finding ways to promote our own ideology while putting down another person or group for their beliefs. While I find it important to highlight abuses, I want us to take a second and remember that the Pirate fight, is a fight for love.
I have found myself being drawn into it myself, my social media feeds spew negativity from my various social acquaintances and it’s very easy to get drawn into these negative emotions. You find people who line their pockets with cash, and they try to change the law to allow themselves to not only make what they do acceptable, but enable it as well. We blame these people for what is wrong with our world, but the truth is that these people are not evil.
There is no (well minded) person on Earth, in my belief, that is out to do wrong: simply to do wrong. It comes from generations of beliefs being passed down, and comes from those who themselves believe that by carrying out their beliefs they are actually making the world a better place. I cannot hate another person for wanting to do what’s right, I can only love them for their effort and attempt to guide public opinion in another direction.
We are pirates because we believe in the true social good. This blog post doesn’t belong to me, this blog post belongs to all the people who have inspired me and educated me. Everything from my mannerisms to my poor punctation skills all were influenced by other people. I am an accumulation of my past, and I pass that on to others in the future (hopefully not my poor punctuation, but that too probably).
When we say we want the right to privacy, we are not asking for privacy so we can then break the law or to protect people who wish to harm others. We demand a right to privacy because we feel that all people are entitled to the basic right of security of their persons, and we (through our enhanced knowledge we gained through the internet) have seen the dangers of a society which deprives people of that right. We want privacy because we love, and we recognize that while we might (and a big might at that) all be safer if there was 100% transparency in every detail of every persons life and if we all walked around naked, sharing every fleeting thought that crosses our mind… but that we must trust each other enough to know that it is not in any persons nature to want to harm another person for no reason.
We recognize that we must put our faith in those around us, because they are the ones who make our democracy work. They provide the services that we rely on to live, and have services provided to us which make our job easier. The people around us all have a general purpose of making the world a better place. While some people do what they need to do to survive or to provide short term gains for themselves, there is no well minded person who wishes to have the world be a worse place when they leave it.
Christians have done horrible things in their past, and I believe that most religious organizations have been corrupted into doing the wrong thing, but these organizations are not doing wrong simply because they are evil but because of a series of events that have happened in the past which have given these organizations the warped view that their path is the nobel path.
Instead of finding our differences within the Christians though, what we must show is that we have far more similarities than we do differences. The Pirate movement is a near living embodiment of the desires of Jesus Christ had he been living in modern times. Do you think Jesus would want every person to have a minimum income? I think he would have.
I am tired of hating, we have too much hate. I used to smile more often than anyone else, but I have allowed my strong emotions towards the goals of our ideology and the wrong doings of others to polarize me. I still smile, and I still like giving random people high fives, but I need to do more of that. I want the Pirate Party to not only protect civil liberties, and share in the way that we all have been taught from our parents (and as they were taught by their parents), but let us bring our love to the world too.
Make a post about something beautiful, tell the world what is making you happy. Why get your joy and entertainment from putting other people down? When we speak hate, we are not making the world a better place and from an ideological standpoint, people are tuning us out from it. People want to hear good news, people want to hear about love.
It’s not about being a hippy, you can love and be well dressed and have a job. It’s a mindset you must have. Next time you are going to post something about a person or organization that is doing something wrong, I would like you to find something that they do good and post that instead or at the very least post the good thing along side the negative:
“X, I know you guys are doing Y because you feel it is good for society, but I feel that it will cause Z”
I love the Pirate Party, and because I am a bit socially awkward — I find it hard to make friends. You guys have been my best friends, and you make my life better. Thank you.
What you say is true, there is too much hatred in the world, and being nice to people helps to reduce that.
But what do you do about corporations. The law in some countries says they are ‘people’. But corporations are not well minded, they are psychopathic. They (and their senior managers) are required to ‘maximise shareholder value’ regardless of the consequences. So a lawyer working for film industry body sues someone worth $1000, for $150,000; because he downloaded a copyrighted work using bit torrent – and therefore by the nature of the software, also distributeded at least some of the work. There is a moral failure here, on the part of the lawyer for knowingly taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut – with intent to cause the defendant grief. There is also a moral failure here among those who wrote laws that permit draconian criminal penalties for sharing something. But if a corporation is legally a person, then a corporation can be (and mostly they are) greedy and avaricious beyond belief.
I think it will take something more than wishing the lawyer a pleasant day to make him see that harassing defendants is a demonstration of his own moral bankruptcy. It will certainly take very much more to straighten out Western laws so that basic rights, such as privacy and freedom of speech are effectively protected by governments.
It’s all about intent – Joe Executive from a media company, honestly feels that piracy is hurting artists. They are not lying to make more money, because it would be much cheaper for them to not fight us. They are fighting, because they truly believe that unchecked piracy will be the end of media (or whatever their individual belief is).
Those executives of major corporations are still human beings. They still love, and they still want what is best for society. They may have different views than us on what is actually best for society, but that’s where we need to be the reasonable people and say “look, we understand that you want your company to be super rich, because you honestly feel that you are providing a service to people and by having more money, you can provide that service to more people… but the way you are doing it is wrong”.
The guys at the top of these corporations are not twirling their mustaches. They are just a product of their education and background.
The thing is, these people, or at least the voting public at large, are not going to vote for us or support us because we attack other people. They are tired of attack ads. The are tired of people constantly putting down other people.
If a group comes forward and starts being positive, that will win over tons and tons of voters and make our positions sound much more favourable in the ears of the general public.
Very Nice Words!
Good points. Sermons and vitriol don’t don’t sway too many people who weren’t already swayed in the first place. And they tend to deviate from logic into emotional arguments that can easily be picked apart or, more often, just ignored. (e.g. “Chris Dodd kills kittens!!”)
And there’s also something to be said for defining yourself, or the group you represent, by what they are rather than by what they are opposed to. With the chaos of anti-this and anti-that sentiments spewing into everyone’s news feeds, nothing really stands out unless it can answer questions like “What are YOU doing?” and “Why are YOU better?”… things that can’t be answered just by ripping the opposition apart.
That “catch more flies with honey” thing isn’t just about being nice. It’s also strategic.
While I did allude to the fact that loving people unconditionally is a strategic thing to do, I really hope that you and the other readers do not interpret that to be my “read between the lines” meaning of the post.
You should love other people, because that is what makes you a good person yourself. We all know what it’s like to be picked on (because of weight, awkwardness, beliefs, etc). We should never subject another person to that.
If I was the CEO of a company, and a group of people actually /hated/ me… that would affect me emotionally. No person wants to be hated. However, most of the people who reach the level of CEO are aggressive — so they are not going to listen to why they are hated, they are going to take it as an insult and even do what they are doing more to get back at those people for hating them
Reading that, you can see the strategy, but what I want you to read is the fact that your hate could affect someone else emotionally. Remember how that felt when it happened to you in the playground. Why would you /ever/ want to subject someone else to it?
> “… the truth is that these people are not evil”
yes .. the truth is this is about entropy and awareness.
The simplest thing a person can do (the path of increasing entropy – the path of decay) is to have his/her higher faculties asleep while she lives along the easiest path available. And the easy paths are maintained by the capitalist world we live – a world of authoritarian materialism mediated by corporate might. The easiest path is to accumulate material wealth and power for oneself while worshipping the ultimate authority of the corporate state.
.. an aware, self-evolving, moral person might describe the enthusiastic inhabitants of this materialist capitalist world as “evil”. But really, they’re just rolling down the simplest path according to capitalist gravity.
the only way to break out of the entropy trap is to become aware, break through the endless media conditioning, create our own personal morality, and make the effort.
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Travis, right now you are my hero. Thank you so much for your words, they really brought a smile on my face, and I agree with almost everything you have written: the only thing you said that I cannot agree with is that no-one is inherently “evil”… believe me, people can be just like that too, unfortunately.
Anyway, our world is in dire need of many more people like you. Keep on being the awesome person you are!
A big hug from Italy!
Andrea
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