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Why You Don't Matter

Written by: Herb Gilliland

Article Overview: How business and legalese have destroyed the American Dream.

Why You Don't Matter



How business and legalese have destroyed the American Dream. According to the law in the US, writing down information on a napkin gives you State-level protection under the law. This means that you own the content you wrote on that napkin - in the State where you are a resident. If you choose to speak that golden content instead of writing it, well, you don't own it unless you are recording it, and then you only own the recording. If someone else records it -- say a TV reporter or a Geek with his Geeky Gadget or cellphone -- they own it, and can do with it what they wish, and there is little you can do to stop it if you noticed they were recording it while you were making the statement (or immediately before).

This basically means that the things your body produces: your urine, particularly (since many Government officials and private sector entities love to collect it), your words, that song you played at the bar, that catch-phrase that caught you in highschool, your nickname, probably, are not protected and are not yours. If you refuse to give a urine sample, in most cases, there is something that the requesting entity will take away: your job, your freedom, etc.

It's more proof that, if you thought your ideas and your neurons were yours -- they aren't. In fact, companies vie for control of your neurons every single day. Google probably owns a large number of your neurons, just because their assets protect their mindshare so very, very adequately. There is little you can do about this: you will have a Google memory every single day you talk to anyone in the modern world. You can't get out of it -- moreover, THEY WON'T LET YOU -- and that's because they're rich and yes.. theyrule (.net) -- and I guess that's the way it's supposed to be.

Before slavery was abolished, things in America were pretty honest. You knew who your master was, and what they wanted you to do -- or pay a punishment which could include your death. Today, however, the system only possesses the remnants of slavery and feudalism, not the thing itself, and therefore those insipid laws that basically force people into indentured servitude (money for sweat) and eradicate any idea of monopolistic intellectual property in the hands of an actual human being. Yes, yes indeed, the slide toward a second Dark Age becomes ever more apparent as you study the ins and outs of the legal profession.

Let's take a common situation -- a phrasing, if you will, of a familiar situation, which has direct ramifications in the law.

If I, for instance, were to say "Meet me at Burger King at 6pm and I will buy you a sandwich", and you showed up at the time I asserted to get a sandwich, I'm not legally bound to buy you that sandwich because we have never made an agreement. You never said "Ok", and therefore no agreement was reached. In effect, no contract was created and thus, there is no binding agreement between us. However, if you said "Ok", I'd be bound by law to buy you that sandwich -- even if no lawyer would ever permit it, and even if the courts wouldn't hear it, it would be, as they say, technically a contract. Strange how the legal system can work, eh? However, if I invented something and said "You may not use this for business purposes", well, if you go and do the opposite that is breaking the agreement.

Likewise, if I asked you to go and pick up a newspaper, and you did, you did not fufill a contract unless you said "Ok" ... if you did not say "Ok" and did it, it doesn't even create evidence of the agreement that, in laymens terms "we made", and therefore no agreement was reached even though both parties were satsified. In effect, I told you to do something, and you of your own free will fufilled my wishes. It had nothing to do with an oral contract of any type. Of course, both of us would agree that we were in some sort of implicated agreement which you fulfilled. I think you can agree to that.

That makes absolutely no sense -- no one, in their right mind, would ever think that that is what an advance society would put in place as a proper representation of life, and therefore the legal profession (and lawyers will tell you this) is not here to help you live your life. It's not even here to help victims or criminals, it's here to serve its legal reasoning and its legal process. A process which, I have demonstrated, alienates people and is not designed for people at all -- it appears, however erroneously, to be causing as many problems as it solves. And, in fact, the legal process is self-serving and thus is designed to be articulated by its insiders -- those who have chosen to enter the special social echelon of lawyering. It makes you ask yourself, "Why did we do this?" The answer is: we did not. They did.

They don't want you to walk in front of their mansions in California. In fact, laws there state that NO ONE even if a person on a PUBLIC SIDEWALK is to step within 15 feet (thus, about 5 feet into the road, or the width of a single vehicle) of aforementioned mansions, that they are trespassing and can be held accountable in a court of law if they are found walking within 15 feet of the outside fence of a property. The law expresses the word "mansions" and "gated dwellings" as its primary zones of applicability. Essentially, you are not to go near those mansions because you are of a special class -- we'll call them, for the sake of argument, non-mansioned citizens -- and therefore you do not receive the same rights afforded to the property owners.

Now, the property owners, they want you to buy their goods and services. So, they spend millions of dollars per year carefully crafting a public image. Since these public personas are of a significantly enabled group -- that is, a group whereby the members are all either politically powerful, socially enabled and thus recognizeable, or simply fiscally wealthy -- most of the organizations who bring you the content that has been designed for you to see (you know, the advertisements, television dramas and other content) help to perpetuate a perceived equality while veiling and obscuring the double standard provided by the system at large.

Therefore, you are not wanted here except to spend money. This policy is common throughout consumer culture. You will be asked to leave a restaurant if you order water only. You will be asked to leave a store if you are not there to browse and buy. You will be forcibly removed from a store if you refuse, probably by a person who arrives in a white sedan with the words "To Serve And Protect" written on the side. Additionally, your value to these people comes in two forms: your disposable income (the tiny scraps of money they pay you which no longer hold any value or what little value they hold is fluctuating) and your skills (the few specialized processes you know about that they will pay you the tiny scraps of money for).

They will tell you you live in a free country -- one that is "For Liberty and Justice For All", but if you study any of the actual laws that do directly effect your life, you will soon discover that it's really "For Money and Justice For the Few" ... since money translates almost directly to freedoms, you can assume that anywhere Liberty is mentioned they are actually talking about money, and anywhere "For All" is mentioned you should really read this as "the priviledged few" -- ie: those who have it (that thing you thought you wanted) and who aren't willing to share (also known as a capitalist).

Of course, scientists and educators will tell you that society is actually condemning the creative spirits who seek to improve it. They will try to get you to share, work in groups, communicate, discuss, collaborate .. but business, it is there to isolate, indoctrinate (for the purposes of making money) and incarcerate. The biggest wealth holders in the modern world have the biggest prison systems. This means business can be directly correlated to crime (not just in actuality, but also as a side effect).

Maybe you think communism is better: and perhaps, in small groups, it is. Unfortunately, true creative capitalism is never permitted -- and I don't mean the type of creative bookcooking the likes of Enron. No, what I mean by creative capitalism is the opposite of the destructive, isolating, self-absorbed and ignorant capitalism we see today. You know that brand -- the type of capitalism which erodes common decency, leaves the masses unwashed, lets veterans die in the streets and chokes the seals with plastic six-pack holders. They're the ones who save money by creating goods that break after only a few months, so you can basically buy a subscription to a bunch of broken parts, year after year, decade after decade because it's crap.

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Article Tags: american dream, legalese



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