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name_is_important.md
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# Name Is Important
Name of a philosophy, project, movement, group, ideology etc. plays a more significant role than a common man believes. A naive view is that name is just an identifier, a common man will rather believe promise of politician than the name of his party; however name is much more than a mere string of letters, it is the single most stable defining feature of an entity; everything else, all the books and knowledge associated with it may be distorted by history, but the name will always stay the same and will hold a scrutiny over all actions of the entity, it will always be a permanent reminder to every follower of what he is trying to achieve. But what if the name of the movement changes? Then it is to be considered a new, different movement. The name usually holds the one true goal.
Name of a philosophy, project, movement, group, [ideology](ideology.md) etc. plays a more significant role than a common man believes. A naive view is that name is just an arbitrary identifier whose value lies at most being "catchy" and "easily remembered" (see also [marketing](marketing.md)), a common man will rather believe promise of politician than the name of his party which he will disregard just as a "bunch of unimportant words"; however name is much more than a mere string of letters, it is the single most stable defining feature of an entity; everything else, all the books and knowledge associated with it may be distorted by history, but the name will always stay the same and will hold a scrutiny over all actions of the entity, it will always be a permanent reminder to every follower of what he is trying to achieve. But what if the name of the movement changes? Then it will be by definition a new, different movement, and everyone will have to decide if he wants to abandon the old movement to join the new. The name very often points towards the one true goal.
For this we have to keep in mind two things:
HOWEVER, here also comes a word of **warning**: firstly language itself (i.e. meanings of all words that exist in it) changes, and also although the power of the name is great, it is not infinite, the discussed stress of the importance of name should just remind us that the force of the name is greater than one might expect, but may will still be broken if stronger forces are at play -- there have been many cases of **name abuse** in history, notably e.g. by [Nazism](nazi.md) whose name stands for "national socialism" but whose actions were completely antisocialist, or so called ["Anarcho" capitalism](ancap.md) which abuses the name *[anarchism](anarchism.md)* despite being completely antianarchist. The moral of the story here is that we should put a great effort in choosing a name, but we shouldn't think we'll be safe as long as we do -- we will probably never be safe from the fuzziness of language and its potential to be abused, but we should try to do our best.
We have to keep in mind two things:
- When encountering a new movement/philosophy/ideology etc., we can tell a lot about it from its name: the name is its ultimate goal which **will be pursued on detriment of other goals**. A lot of times the bad movements are those **named after the means** (e.g. *[capitalism](capitalism.md)* or *[open source](open_source.md)*) **or [people](hero_culture.md)** (e.g. Maoism) rather than goals (e.g. *pacifism*) because by this dominance the focus on means will inevitably subordinate the goal.
- When starting a new movement, we have to pay very careful attention to giving it a name.
Nevertheless keep in mind that while the power of the name is great, it is not infinite and the above may not hold if stronger forces are at play -- there have been many cases of **name abuse** in history, notably e.g. by [Nazism](nazi.md) whose name stands for "national socialism" but whose actions were completely anti-socialist, or so called ["Anarcho" capitalism](ancap.md) which abuses the name *[anarchism](anarchism.md)* despite being completely anti-anarchist.
Let us comment on a few examples:
- **[Capitalism](capitalism.md)**: The goal is maximization of capital -- capital should be the means to achieving "something" (what lol?), but it instead becomes the goal. There is no promise of a good society, it is not mentioned in the name, and indeed what we get is a system that evolves corporations that get progressively better at maximizing capital, on the detriment of people.