By now you may have heard of Amazon remotely erasing from their electronic books, the Kindle, copies of 1984 and Animal Farm. The reaction has been generally scathing, but it's a different aspect brought to light which I want to comment on. To whit, 1984 and Animal Farm were erased because the copyright holder objected. But...
While the copyright on “1984” will not expire until 2044 in the United States, it has already expired in other countries, including Canada, Australia and Russia. Web sites in those countries offer digital copies of the book free to all comers.
George Orwell died in 1950. Fifty-nine years ago. In the US copyright on 1984 will note expire untill 94 years after he died. The constitution gave Congress the right to set intellectual property laws to encourage people to create new works, but the idea that anyone would care whether or not their work is still under copyright 94 years after they died is ludicrous.
This, in fact, primarily the work of one company. Call it the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, because the law went into effect to make sure Mickey Mouse didn't go into the public domain.
The problem with copyrights, patents and so on is that they stifle innovation and creativity. The ability of everyone to take what has already been done and build on it is at the heart of progress, whether technological, intellectual or creative.
It is also one of the conditions for modern style capitalism and industrialization. Knowledge must be reasonably free, everyone must be able to use it. If it isn't, you move swiftly to a position where IP producers start extracting monopoly profits, which strangles the use of new ideas.
Americans are obsessed with intellectual property because it's one of the few things the US still has a surplus in with the rest of the world. But strangling information also strangles innovation and growth. The price is too high, and it is paid by America as well as America's customers.
Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
Part 1 explored the first idea. Now it's time to examine the second one:
(2) Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths.
The most obvious, and dominant example of this is the so-called "war on terror," which started off as the "war on terrorism"-a very different concept. Terror is a state of mind. Terrorism is a strategy, though the adjective, terrorist-as in "terrorist attack"-more frequently refers to tactics that are part of a terrorist strategy. Neither is the sort of thing that one can fight a war against. Wars on abstract nouns generally do not turn out well, for the simple reason that abstract nouns can never surrender. The fact that the "war on terrorism" imperceptibly morphed into the "war on terror" is indicative of how vacuous and non-sensical the entire enterprise is.
We are way past Orwell's 1984 here. At least Oceana and Eurasia were the sorts of things that could have always been at war with one another. But neither terror nor terrorism are this sort of thing. Indeed, it's not simply false to say "we are fighting a war on terror" (or "terrorism"). It is worse than false. It is meaningless.
The great 20th Century physicist Wolfgang Pauli coined an expression that is applicable here. Having looked at a paper by a young physicist, he remarked that it "wasn't even wrong," meaning that it didn't even get the problem right, much less the solution. And such is the case with the "war on terror/terrorism," as well-although actions taken in its name, such as the Iraq War, can be much worse than meaningless, by greatly worsening the realworld situtation that "war on terror" so meaninglessly mis-describes.
