| Amsterdam,
December 8 2002
Dear reader,
Most important scientific discoveries and technologic developments were and are
products of independent, obstinate individuals who attack existing traditions
and unassailable reputations with unorthodox methods.
Individualism is one of the prime factors that have lead to the superior
economic progress in Western countries. Without individual freedom and human
creativity social and scientific development will in the end stagnate.
Individual capacities of independent citizens have to be strengthened but in
reality they are more and more restricted. The lawmakers of the state try to
canalise (and even prohibit) any new findings or initiatives. This process is
supported by hierarchical mass organisations as political parties, trade unions
or multinationals and also by religions, which block new ideas by using a set of
rules that was based on the situation of many centuries ago. In many other big
organisations as in sport, health or recreation the voice of individuals is also
hardly heard and nearly never decisive.
The interest of the leading group, the elite, dominates more and more the
interest of the masses. Selfish individualism of powerful people at the top
restricts individualism of the powerless. The growing difference in income (and
property) in the Western World is an expression of intolerable greediness. About
the greediness of the American top see e.g. "For Richer" by Paul
Krugman in the NYTimes.
To change this outgrowth of egoistic individualism the masses should develop
action methods that are based on altruistic individualism in which the first
goal is the benefit of all individuals. When humanity in general progresses, the
position of individual humans will also improve. The direct actions described on
my site in which individual masspeople put pressure on individual leaders aim
to change the minds of leaders so they will take the interests of all humans
into account. These creative individualistic actions are in contradiction to the
growing number of laws and rules that aim to make humans a kind of lifeless
robots. This development will demolish the human species that is unique because
of its autonomy and its creativity. These independent actions are also in clear
contradiction to leftist action methods that only want to change the rules and
do not want to abolish the growing restrictions on human development. They also
neglect individual differences between leading people as well as individual
possibilities of activists.
Actions must be directed against the top of the suffocating organisations that
make individualism impossible. People in this top have still some freedom, mass
people have become pawns in a chess game between parts of the elite. After the
game the chess players are again friends no matter how many pawns and pieces
have perished on the board. The pieces on the board must take their own live in
their own hands.
Yours truly, Joost van Steenis
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