Cite Me, Invite Me, Please Don’t Rob Me – Killing Intellectual Subversion

Let’s assume that you devoted decades of your life to guiding your beloved children to independence, joy, peace, and success. There are dozens of ways for other people to ruin your children with crime, immorality, or even legal forms of aggression. Whether your children ended up maimed for life from assaults, bankrupt from corrupt spouses, or on the couches of psychologists from relational and psychological abuse – you would feel as if your life’s most precious work was violated.

This is similar to what we experience when corrupt people violate and steal our intellectual work. The difference is, parenthood is so common that most people can relate to the violation of their children. Because fewer people have chosen to spend decades of their lives in spreadsheets, books, deep thought, experiments, revisions, writing, and painstaking formulation, intellectual violation is poorly understood.

The most obvious indicators of insufficient empathy are not even diatribes from socialists who foolishly demand the end of intellectual property. Apathetic norms are captured in the language used to describe intellectual subversion, such as academic dishonesty and academic misconduct. It’s as if we set loose a gaggle of nursery school babysitters into the adult population whose sole purpose is to protect our most corrupt peers from even experiencing guilt for their fraud. Their attitude:

“Woops! Well, nobody is perfect, you know! A little dishonesty here, a little misconduct there – completely conducive to a normal society. And of course, it’s only relevant for academics.”

Intellectual subversion extends far beyond academic institutions. Direct victims include independent researchers, professionals in various fields, analysts, journalists, fiction writers, comedians, software developers, historians, engineers, and scientists. They are the creators, and violating them does not just harm them. There are consequences for consumers, and the progress of humanity itself. In reality, there is no level of intellectual subversion that is acceptable; we must detect and punish it with vigor.

Intellectual subversion is the disruption of society’s system of creation and discovery. There are multiple tactics that frauds use:

1. Bribery

2. Cheating

3. Deception – giving false information to resource providers in order to gain advantage in competition. For instance, an entertainer can currently buy one-hundred YouTube likes for five dollars. So a person with a $50,000 marketing budget can buy a “viral” video with one-million likes. In this way, purely idiotic ideas make untalented hacks famous while genuinely good creations are crowded out of the public’s attention.

4. Fabrication – falsification of data and evidence

5. Impersonation – assuming the identity of a creator to give them an advantage. Shadow writers are paid impersonators, but they make their agreements without coercion.

6. Plagiarism – the reproduction of another creator’s work without crediting, citing, or acknowledging them

7. Sabotage – interfering with the completion of or attention to another creator’s work

8. Appropriation – taking the ideas, methods, findings, and conclusions of the original creator and rewording them without crediting the creator. This is an insidious form of intellectual subversion that combines sabotage and masked plagiarism. It’s not necessarily illegal, because we can’t copyright an idea.

All of these tactics destroy the lives’ work of creators – robbing them in ways that a common thief could never fathom. They also rob the public of the best creations, and lift up incompetent people who then destroy the work that they stole with their inexperience and unfamiliarity with the content.

The public not only loses access to the best creations; the subverted creations they consume are only distorted shades of the original. The process of intellectual subversion also breaks the chain of creation. The original creator with all the knowledge and skills to refine and adapt the work efficiently and superiorly is cut out of the future of the creation.

There are over one-hundred citations and credits in Economic Sovereignty. I would be glad to discuss the results, collaborate, or present to any interested party. I believe that I speak for most creators when I kindly request for readers to cite me, invite me, but please don’t rob me.

Everyone loses when intellectual subversion is perpetrated – society at large and the thieves included. When the public discovers the truth, the thieves become infamous and lose any advantage they robbed from the devoted lifetimes of honest creators. We will kill intellectual subversion by bringing consequences to the thieves – including the ones who technically did not break intellectual property laws. Making them infamous by exposing their fraud, and persuading the public to choose genuine creations will go a long way.