Community and
collectivism are opposites. Community is valuable and powerful; it is
individuals freely choosing to cooperate and identify with each other to
achieve more than they can individually, as we do in the open-source community.
Collectivism
is a fraud. It pretends to be about community, but it is actually about the use
of force. Collectivists want us not only to bow to their desire for power over
others, but to thank them for coercing us and praise them as our moral
superiors.
Compassion is
a duty of every individual. Groups of people organizing voluntarily to achieve
compassionate ends are deserve admiration and support. Collectivists pervert
compassion, speaking the language of caring but committing the actions of
criminals.
It is a crime
to rob your neighbor. It is a crime to use your neighbor for your own ends
without allowing him or her a choice in the matter. It is a crime to deprive
your neighbor of his liberty when he or she has committed no aggression against
you.
These crimes
are no less crimes when a sociopath (or a politician – but, I repeat myself)
justifies them by chanting “for the poor” or “for the children” or “for the
environment”. They do not cease to be crimes just because a majority has been
conned into voting for them. The violence is just as violent, the victims just
as injured, the harm done just as grave.
Valid ethical
propositions do not contain proper names. What is criminal for an individual to
do is criminal for a community to do. Collectivists are not the builders of
community, as they pretend, but its deadliest enemies – its corrupters and
betrayers. When we fail to understand these simple truths, we board a train to
genocide and the gulags.
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