The Jurisprudence of a ‘Pig-Lit’: Babe and Philosophy

Jan 012011
 

Introduction
Many people have fallen in love with Babe since its inception in 1995. It is an adaption from the kid-lit novel ‘The Sheep-Pig’, written by Dick King-Smith in 1983, which embarked upon changing the standpoint and belief, so firmly held by society, that pigs are stupid creatures, void of any other purpose other than human consumption. It is for this reason that Babe represents such an iconic figure for many of the generation Y and X children that have been charmed by the ‘wee-pig’. Admittedly, many movies have embarked to thematize barnyard alis and construct a rapport with their audience though anthropomorphism (Charlotte’s Web, The Animals of Farthing Wood, et cetera). Why then does Babe have such appeal over other movies and shows of that era, age demographic and stylization? A classic lit-analysis would portend such prescient issues such as how the (Tolkienish) journey is embarked upon, how adversity and oppression are overcome, and how marginalisation is rampant within society. Its main focus being upon the text’s intrinsic forms and representation, rather than the underlying subtextual scope. I would like to put forward the notion that this text is a perfect account of ‘bestial lex populi’. Its appeal, rather than being based purely on its stylization and beautiful prose/dialogue, is in its subliminal referencing to cultural theory and jurisprudence. Although Babe does lack a legal surface detail (courts, lawyers’, legalese) its legal underpinning can be found through the exposure of societal legalistic issues: class, gender and, particularly, race which lies upon the contractual property regimes of animal slavery.

Sixteen years have passed since Babe was in cinemas, and over that time, many websites have tried to ‘piece’ together the philosophy of Babe. Most of the (fan)analysis has only credited an ultra vires or intra vires approach, which appears to limit the “legal imagination” and subvert the subjectivity of jurisprudential legal fictions. The philosophy in Babe is obviously theoretical and abstract, but the key areas that I believe to be the most imperative have been hitherto overlooked. What I intend to do is rectify the inadequacies of the current literature by viewing the shows’ juristically as a whole-system of interconnected characters with varying standpoints. There are many nuances and metaphors, throughout the movie, that are not clear at first. Nevertheless, it is these similitude’s to cultural movements (human rights, feminism, queer theory), that develop an a-legal quotidian of “cultural” and “legal” representation. It is for this reason that I suggest looking at Babe as a jurisprudential text. And, from this, recontextualise, for a generalist audience, the issues of law, and the issues of (in)justice, which are pertinently illustrated throughout.

Bacon or Babe
The movie starts with a voice-over stating that ‘bacon’, ‘ham’, and ‘pork chops’, all come from the same ‘wonderful, magical animal’. It shows the piglet suckling upon his mother, only to be interrupted by the prodding of an electrical rod, and the mother pigs being ‘man-handled’ into the awaiting (Sunny Valley) meat lorry. A few minutes later an artificial feeder drops down to the piglets, in an almost Erik Erikson styled regiment, which is also similar to Pavlov’s behaviourism, the pigs separate themselves from their mother, and continue suckling from the ‘artificial’ teat as they did before. The narrator then continues to tell the story (false consciousness) of the adaged fiction held by the pigs:

This is a tale about an unprejudiced heart, and how it changed our valley forever. There was a time not so long ago when pigs were afforded no respect, except by other pigs; they lived their whole lives in a cruel and sunless world. In those days pigs believed that the sooner they grew large and fat, the sooner they’d be taken into Pig Paradise, a place so wonderful that no pig had ever thought to come back.

It is this ‘cruel world’, or as Hobbes contended, a world at war with “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of [wo]man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, that I wish to embark upon. For it is this specieism that allows for the profiteering in slavery, and grants those with vested interests the permission to mistreat pigs and other animals; indeed, to allow them to endure, for the benefit of humans, a life without a sovereign (protection), a life of pain (caged), and a life of uncertainty (international live exports).

Brian Sherman’s article ‘From Paddock to Prison’ illustrates the starting sequence of Babe unerringly:

when buying bacon, ham and pork, most Australians imagine pigs living in the ‘old MacDonald farm’ of nursery rhymes, roaming freely and wallowing in the mud.

The reality, as he asserts, is that 90% of Australian pigs live a life more sinister. Their lives are unlike Babe’s whose fortunes at the Hogget’s farm are exemplary, but rather housed in stalls, with an inability to move, living an artificial life, surrounded by the watchmen of a Foucaultian/Benthamic Panoptico-discipline.

In relation to this, Babe can be read in two distinct ways that compliment, rather than detract, from the veracity of the argument. The first is looking at Babe in the context of an animal rights advocate, and I agree that the resounding reason for the movie was to regain controversy on the lack of regulations in 1995. The second, however, is that the characters are portending a legalistic scheme and putting forward a critique of the law, not so much of animal law (or lack of), but the ‘the rule of law’. The similitude’s that are drawn, such as the misconception that humans are different to pigs, can be seen at the fair with the squealing children and the analogous squeals of the runt as both are forcefully tossed upside down. Furthermore, it can be seen with the nauseating Mrs. Hogget’s approach to the pig. Looking up at her, she asks ‘who’s going to grow up to be a big fat pig?’ It is this caricature that I believe sets the scene for the remainder of the movie. On the one hand, we have the lean, well-mannered and kind pig, the other, its binary opposite. This naturally conjures the question: who is this pig, and who would want to grow up to be like it?

Mr. Hogget encounters this contextual issue with the fact Babe may be a pig, but he is different, strange, or as Critical Legal Theory (CLT) contends ‘altere’. He is the otherness, a sub-category of beings that do not function as the normal. And indeed, this is where Babe garners his charm. For although babe may be a gender neutral, runt(ish) piglet, whose vantage was not always so, he personifies a softer law of morality, and gives a proto-feministic contra juridico-political recount of the roles that certain animals fill within human lives: notably the credence that many people pay to a chattels characteristics of ‘cuteness, tastefulness and practicality’.

Moreover, this is how the system of consumerism has evolved, and allowed for elevated statuses amongst the three competing classes: companion (the evil, Machiavellian cat), farm (Rex and Fly – the practical, loyal sheep dogs) and entertainment animals (the miniature ponies at the fair). It is this differentiated regime of classes that contests, as much as confirms, the issues of Marxist class struggles within the movie and in the context of Australian regulation.

What occurs is analogous to what Goran Therborn put forward in 1978, whereby the regulation benefits the farmers, and an animal’s welfare is only thought of when profits may be damaged by adverse opinion. For what Babe feels, with the hierarchies (from the Hogget’s, to the ‘cat’, to the dogs, who enforce the law, et cetera) within the movies, are nevertheless just demonstrative of the classes – so I hazard – within society.

Cat: “Well, the cow’s here to be milked, the dogs are here to help the Boss’s husband with the sheep, and I’m here to be beautiful and affectionate to the boss.”
The notion of equality that Babe puts forward for unrequited love instantiates a symbolic gesture (akin to C. S. Lewis’s Aslan) for respect of all sentient beings, regardless of status, and even more so, industry.

Babe’s Jouissance: Sex, Class and Feminism
The radical feminist movement draws resemblance to how Marx categorized the economical systems of capitalism; being based upon sex, class and the disproportionate power dispersions in society. The Hogget’s farm is a clear contender for how class, sex and station radically differentiate the outcomes and possibilities availed. It becomes unmistakable that rather than displace these preconceived notions, the law enforcers (Rex and Fly), embrace their feudal control, seizing it and enforcing it in a Machiavellian demonstration of might, rather than right. At Babe’s first failed attempt at sheep-herding, he is vouchsafed by fly:

Fly: Nonsense, it’s only your first try. But you’re treating them like equals. They’re sheep, they’re inferior.
Babe: Oh, no they’re not.
Fly: Of course they are. We are their masters, Babe. Let them doubt it for a second and they’ll walk all over you.
Rex the Male Sheepdog: Fly! Get the pig out of there!
Fly: Make them feel inferior – abuse them, insult them.

Indeed, it is this approach that is remunerative of class conflict and sexual inequality. The only animals, apart from Fly, to be female, are the sheep. And their voice is estranged (higher pitched, slower elocution, et cetera), a concept that Carol Gilligan called the “other voice”. It is this ideology of the sheep dogs, pertaining to sheep being incapable of speaking, stupid, inane, et cetera, which allowed for the inequality and mistreatment. Once again, this is analogous to the argument put forward in relation to animal rights treatment, it is clear that the voice of an animal is masked by corporate agenda and cultural proclivities, and lost behind catchy slogans, and misrepresentation of smiling cows and free-range grassy pastures.

For those who are in the minority, the law in Babe is a ‘negative liberty’, an ‘antithesis’, as Isaiah Berlin would contend. It overlooks those whom the law should protect, and gives power/authority to those with the vested interests. Indeed, the only person who looks outside the ancien regime of feudalism is Mr. Hogget. Although softer, and more tolerable, the justice that he stands for in this world is Benthamic, rather than Rawlsian, and a receding figure of power on the social lawscape. Nevertheless, Mr. Hogget evinces, may, on the surface, appear to be constructing a social movement. It is indeed, his joussance and reassuring respect for the ‘wee-pig’, to overlook the obvious classicism pertained to animal, and give the altere an equal opportunity. In the resounding scene, where Mr. Hogget enlists Babe as the applicant, as ‘pig’, and outstrips the other ‘savages’ with their brute force in the sheep trials, the very prejudices that hold society on to can be seen:

Narrator: And though every single human in the stands or in the commentary boxes was at a complete loss for words, the man who in his life had uttered fewer words than any of them knew exactly what to say.
Farmer Hoggett: That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.

Indeed, it this Schmitt-like lawscape that exacerbates law’s violence rather than displaces it, and encourages, both politically and legally, the mentality of separation, namely, an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy.

Race is also personified through two most unlikely characters, Ferdinand the duck, and the lone ‘black sheep’. Indeed, on the one hand, there is Ferdinand, constantly ‘flighty’, who confides that, ‘I suppose [that] the life of an anorexic duck doesn’t amount to much in the broad scheme of things’, and the other, the lone, nameless sheep, whose disposition, as the CRT movement would contend, affirms racial lines: legitimizing minority marginalisation, and the limiting of opportunities based on colour. There is a ‘whiteness’ that underpins the ideological content of their ‘barnyard education’, with its’ inculcation on distinguishing (white) factors and hierarchy, and displaying a limited approach in addressing the needs of their personal community, which draws analogies to the world outside of this superlunary farm. Indeed, the reference to education can be taken a step further. As Noam Chomsky stated:
“Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose.”

If the system was built to produce a “docile compulsive” labour force, rather than cultivating mental growth and maturity, there can be no surprise that the corollary evades a prescription of overlooking the justice of others, and using others as instruments for personal gratification.

Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, there rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctively formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms the starting point out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations.

It is this Hegelian/Marxist mini-dialectic that is alluded to within this Draconian system. Each ‘class’, both of animal and status, establish and internalise the nexus of law and morality.

Babe: Baa-ram-ewe! Baa-ram-ewe! To your breed, your fleece, your clan be true! Sheep be true! Baa-ram-ewe!

As each animal affirms, and confirms, their industry, so too do they internalize and overlook the very existential components of their lives. For what Babe does is hold a mirror up to the lives of humans, it symbolizes the class control, speciesism and injustices that are so often overlooked. What Babe does so magically is emblematize the conflict within society, both intrinsic (with the hierarchy at the farm) and extrinsically (Australian animal regulations) through defining the core issues with the current system: the separation of oneself with the products through the merveilleux advertising, and the redefining of products, starkly different to what characteristics the animal held prior.

Defining Rights
Ferdinand: The fear’s too much for a duck. It – it eats away at the soul! There must be kinder dispositions in far-off gentler lands.
Cow: The only way you’ll find happiness is to accept that the way things are is the way things are.
Ferdinand: ‘The way things are’ stinks! I’m not gonna be a goner, I’m gone! I wish all of you the best of luck.

Everyone, at Hogget farm, makes pretenses about how they feel about the current system. Nevertheless, they all eventually accept the hierarchy. It appears that this ‘apolitical’ world is actually absorbed into a debate about the politics of the law. It figuratively delves into what could be titled ‘class constructivism’, but this does not fully encapsulate the greater issue, as Herbert Marcuse contends, that the system ‘judges them, without being judged by them or being able to be called to account by them, for there is no authority or judge above them’. It is this quasi-reality, both contentious and (un)endearing that the text etherealises as the perfect ‘farm’. Indeed, for many people, the Hogget farm exemplifies their notion of how animals are treated. The obvious truth about industrial farming becomes un-attestable in today’s context; for where the Babe-kid-lit fantasy allows for a system of respect, even – I hazard – a level of rapport between the farmer and his stock, the system of mass(murder) factory farming dissociates at every level. It entwines Marx’s dull compulsion with Foucault’s power dispersions, and, as seen in the classic psychology experiment of the ‘Stanford Prison’, those in power can manipulate cruelty to unfathomable portions, and yet, those involved, feel no accountability.

A revivified rights discourse is actually brought up through the dialogue with Ferdinand and Babe. For many westernised humans, Christmas is time of ‘sharing’, a time to be thankful for everything we have, and many other adaged maxims. But, for Ferdinand, and those who live on this Hobbessian farm, Christmas is a much more sinister occurrence.

Ferdinand: Christmas! Christmas dinner, yeah. Dinner means death. Death means carnage! Christmas means carnage!

Indeed, it is this Posnerian counter-culture where ‘it is wrong to give as much weight to a dog’s pain as to an infant’s pain’, which, undeniably, allows for such inequalities to occur. The conception of justice should be weighed upon a scale that looks past social, religious and economical ideologies, and should focus on the core underlying facets, that are not just akin to ‘humanity’: namely, that animals do not differ in their propensity to suffer. The principles of justice should be chosen behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, with the notion that, behind this veil, in the actual world, not only does one not know their industry, class, race, sex, et cetera, they, furthermore, do not know what species they may be.

It is only through this conception of justice that equality can be reached to safeguard the lives of both animals and humans. It would, undoubtedly, improve the lives of animals and, for that matter, many humans to take an approach that limited class structure and disproportionate rights control of particular dominant groups. Moreover, what can be seen with the regulatory regimes of Australian animals, and so too, on Hogget farm, are the rights of the few being displaced by those in the reigning hierarchical positions of yesteryears. As Therborn contended, ‘the ruling class does what it requires to maximize control’, and indeed, it has done well with maximizing profits through the underhandedness of imbuing a false consciousness into consumers over the treatment of animals. It is this unfair, and antiquarius summation of rights, which is portended upon animals, that must be reviewed in the light of an equal society. It must overlook the proclivities and hitherto structure of regulation, and be based upon premises that revoke the pain and suffering; moreover, being based upon a morality of Rawlsian conception, where there is a distribution of justice for all those with the ‘capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain’.

Conclusion: The Story of Bacon or ‘Babe’
The issues that Babe confronts are multifaceted, but diverge upon two direct lines of cultural legal thought. The first (intrinsic) is the rapport that young audiences build with the ‘wee-pig’. This rapport caused much controversy in the years closely following the movie release, as many people were indecisive about the practices of animal regulation in Australia, and sought to buy ‘free-range’ in an effort to minimize their discomfort of eating a lovable animal. The second (extrinsic) is the legal ramification of status (ownership) of animals. The law has been silent in many areas as the how an animal is to be protected, and, indeed, how they too have rights. It is this Marxist critique that I believe converges on the point that the film is making. It is about rights, or lack of rights, and how the petit bourgeoisie instills false consciousness onto consumers.

Babe stands for a post-modern conceptualization of a rights-bearer – an advocate of justice, a pervasive face in the animal rights movement – being a paradigm of social classism, and inequality. The corollary that Babe evinces, however, is a universal maxim about power: ‘all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Indeed, what Babe stands for is legitimacy, for universalism, a step away from the immunity that is offered to those who abuse animals, and a recasting of rights, where justice is on trial and not hidden behind locked factory doors.

Through reading Babe from a lit-legal-analysis it is clear that it can be thematised by sociology, psychology, feminism, Marxism, CLT and CRT. For Babe’s failures are indicative of the failures of society. Indeed, the failure for humans to look at life from a differing standpoint; to the pain, discomfort and death that people mindlessly take part therein. If Babe stands for anything, I hope that it is for the promotion of a better world: a world where regulations safeguard rights, and rights are safeguarded by justice. A world where animals have a voice, and where the voice of a ‘piglet’ is worth just as much as the voice of a small child.

Primary Sources
Babe (1995) Universal Studios.
Secondary Sources
Journals
Carnahan, T, Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to the Cruelty? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 33, No. 5, 2007.

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Cover, R, Violence and the Word, The Yale Law Journey, 1601 (95), 1986.

Dworkin, R, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, 2000, Harvard
University Press.

Fleischhacker, S, A Short History of Distributive Justice, 1st ed, Harvard University Press, 2005.
Foucault, M, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed, Vintage, United Kingdom, 1995.
Emerich, E, Essays on Freedom and Power, Boston, The Beacon Press, 1949.

Maslow, A, A Theory of Human Motivation, American Psychological Review 50, 1943.

Mackinnon, C, Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: towards Feminist Jurisprudence, Feminist Legal Theory: readings in law and Gender K Bartlett and R Kennedy, Feminist Theory 7, University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Sherman, B, From paddocks to prisons: pigs in New South Wales, Australia: current practices, future directions, 1st ed, Paddington, N.S.W: Voiceless, 2005

Schmitt, C, Politische Theologie, 1st ed, Duncker and Humblot, Auflage, 2009.

White, Boyd, The Legal Imagination, 5th ed, Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

Books
Agamben, G, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 2nd ed, Stanford University Press, 1998.

Austin, J, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 17th ed, Campbell, 1909.

Bentham, J, The Panopticon Writings, Miran Bozovic ed, London, Verso, 1995.

Foucault, M, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1st ed, Vintage, 1995.

Gilligan, C, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, 29th ed, Harvard University Press, 1993.

Hart, H, Problems of the Philosophy of Law, Edwards ed, 1967.

Hegel, G, Phenomenology of Spirit, 37 ed, Oxford University Press, United States, 1977.

Hegel, G, Jena Lectures of 1805-¬‐6: The Philosophy of Spirit, Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1983.

Hobbes, T, Leviathan (World Classics), Reissue ed, Oxford University Press, USA.

Hume, D, A Treatise Of Human Nature, Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.

Loyd, Normativity and Politics of Form, 139 University of Pennsylvania, 1991.

MacNeil, W, Lex populi: the jurisprudence of popular culture, 1st ed, Stanford
University Press, Stanford California, 2007.

Marcuse, H, A Study on Authority, ed Verso, 1972.

Marx, K, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonoparte, Marx Engels Werke, A. Wood ed, 8, 1856.

Nozick, R, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 22nd ed, Basic Books, London, England, 1977.

Rawls, J, A theory of Justice, 2nd ed, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, USA, 1999.

Schopenhauer, A, The World as Will and Representation, 8th ed, Dover, England, 1974.

Therborn, G, What does the Ruling Class do when it Rules, Verso ed, Sweden, 1978.

Online
Chomsky, N, Class Warfare, accessed 14/10/10.

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Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes

Sep 302010
 

Mary Wollstonecraft has been called the “first feminist” or “mother of feminism.” Her book-length essay on women’s rights, and especially on women’s education, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a classic of feminist thought, and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the history of feminism.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s life and her work have been interpreted in widely different ways, depending on the attitude of the writer towards women’s equality or depending on the thread of feminism with which a writer is associated.

Mary Wollstonecraft is usually considered a liberal feminist because her approach is primarily concerned with the individual woman and about rights. She could be considered as a difference feminist in her honoring of women’s natural talents and her insistence that women not be measured by men’s standards. Her work has a few glimmers of some modern sexuality and gender analysis in her consideration of the role of sexual feelings in the relationships between men and women. Mary Wollstonecraft can be claimed with some legitimacy by communitarian feminists: their critique of a “rights” approach echoes in Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on duty in the family and in civic relationships. And she can also be seen as a precursor of the political feminists: her Vindication and perhaps even more her Maria: The Wrongs of Woman link women’s oppression to the need for men to change.

Quotes:

  • I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.
  • Contending for the rights of women, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice.
  • Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; — that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.
  • The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.
  • If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?
  • Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education.
  • Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.
  • Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.
  • No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
  • It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust — ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable — and life is more than a dream.

Society Analogy: Humans and Porcupines

Aug 172010
 

A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature. The moderate distance which they at last discover to be the only tolerable condition of intercourse, is the code of politeness and fine manners; and those who transgress it are roughly told — in the English phrase — to keep their distance . By this arrangement the mutual need of warmth is only very moderately satisfied; but then people do not get pricked. A man who has some heat in himself prefers to remain outside, where he will neither prick other people nor get pricked himself.

Germaine Greer Quotes

Jun 192010
 

The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.

Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They’ve become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master’s ulterior motives — to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It’s a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that’s got to be changed.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly’s foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.

The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.

They still say “fuck you” as a venomous insult; they still find “cunt” the most degrading epithet outside the dictionary.

Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.

A woman’s pleasure is not dependent upon the presence of a penis in the vagina; neither is a man’s.

The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colours until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, “Why are there no great women artists?” it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world.

Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don’t-want-to-do-it-but-we-don’t-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It’s better to print and be damned, because you’ll be damned anyway.

Kinkiness comes from low energy. It’s the substitution of lechery for lust.

Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren’t really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we’ve been castrated and that’s what it’s all about. You see, it’s all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you’ve already cut his balls off, because you know he’s not going to do anything. That’s exactly what happened to women.

Regardless of the dutiful pushing of condoms in the girls’ press, the exposure of baby vaginas and cervixes to the penis is more likely to result in pregnancy and infection than orgasm.

If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go, baby.

We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.

If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?

The Roman Catholic Church Comparison to Atheism

Jun 052010
 

Roman Catholicism is even worse than Atheism itself, in my opinion! Yes, that’s my opinion! Atheism only preaches a negation, but Catholicism goes further: it preaches a distorted Christ, a Christ calumniated and defamed by themselves, the opposite of Christ! It preaches the Antichrist, I declare it does, I assure you it does! This is the conviction I have long held, and it has distressed me, myself… Roman Catholicism cannot hold its position without universal political supremacy, and cries: ‘Non possumus!’ To my thinking Roman Catholicism is not even a religion, but simply the continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinated to that idea, faith to begin with. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne, and grasped the sword; everything has gone on in the same way since, only they have added to the sword lying, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, villainy. They have trifled with the most holy, truthful, sincere, fervent feelings of the people; they have bartered it all, all for money, for base earthly power. And isn’t that the teaching of Antichrist? How could Atheism fail to come from them? Atheism has sprung from Roman Catholicism itself. It originated with them themselves. Can they have believed themselves? It has been strengthened by revulsion from them; it is begotten by their lying and their spiritual impotence! Atheism! Among us it is only the exceptional classes who don’t believe, those who, as Yevgeny Pavlovitch splendidly expressed it the other day, have lost their roots. But over there, in Europe, a terrible mass of the people themselves are beginning to lose their faith — at first from darkness and lying, and now from fanaticism and hatred of the church and Christianity.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sigmund Freud Quotes

Jun 032010
 

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller’s words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.

Where id is, there shall ego be.

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.

In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?

The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.

If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.

Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state — admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological — in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that “I” and “you” are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.

I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest, but we have not altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relations to her male child).

Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home.

Rollo May Quotes

Jun 032010
 

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.

We are more apt to feel depressed by the perpetually smiling individual than the one who is honestly sad. If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.

Therapy isn’t curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society — Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.

One does not become fully human painlessly.

Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.

It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness.

The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

The upshot is that the values and goals which provided a unifying center for previous centuries in the modern period no longer are cogent. We have not yet found the new center which will enable us to choose our goals constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of not knowing which way to move. Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a “slave-morality.” Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being “de-humanized,” and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identify as persons.

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being’s age old capacity to be insurgent. They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings. You reject certain ways of saying it; you select others, always trying to form the poem again. In your forming, you arrive at new and more profound meanings than you had even dreamed of. Form is not a mere lopping off of meaning that you don’t have room to put into your poem; it is an aid to finding new meaning, a stimulus to condensing your meaning, to simplifying and purifying it, and to discovering on a more universal dimension the essence you wish to express.

You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also, you will have betrayed your community in failing to make your contribution.

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world.

The crucial question which confronts us in psychology and other aspects of the science of man is precisely this chasm between what is abstractly true and what is existentially real for the given living person.

It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it … Modern Western man thus finds himself in the strange situation, after reducing something to an abstraction, of having then to persuade himself it is real. … the only experience we let ourselves believe in as real, is that which precisely is not.

Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity, who is able to affirm his being, if need be, against all other beings and the whole inorganic world.

Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

Man is the “ethical animal” — ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment — like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being — is based upon his consciousness of himself.

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one’s inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle. Strange as it sounds, steady, patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage. Thus if the term “hero” is used in this discussion at all, it must refer not to the special acts of outstanding persons, but to the heroic element potentially in every man.

Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility.

I have described the human dilemma as the capacity of man to view himself as object and as subject. My point is that both are necessary — necessary for psychological science, for effective therapy, and for meaningful living. I am also proposing that in the dialectical process between these two poles lies the development, and the deepening and widening, of human consciousness. The error on both sides — for which I have used Skinner and the pre-paradox Rogers as examples — is the assumption that one can avoid the dilemma by taking one of its poles. It is not simply that man must learn to live with the paradox — the human being has always lived in this paradox or dilemma, from the time that he first became aware of the fact that he was the one who would die and coined a word for his own death. Illness, limitations of all sorts, and every aspect of our biological state we have indicated are aspects of the deterministic side of the dilemma — man is like the grass of the field, it withereth. The awareness of this, and the acting on this awareness, is the genius of man the subject. But we must also take the implications of this dilemma into our psychological theory. Between the two horns of this dilemma, man has developed symbols, art, language, and the kind of science which is always expanding in its own presuppositions. The courageous living within this dilemma, I believe, is the source of human creativity.

Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one’s courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own.

In a world where numbers inexorably take over as our means of identification, like flowing lava threatening to suffocate and fosilize all breathing life in its path; in a world where “normality” is defined as keeping your cool; where sex is so available that the only way to preserve any inner center is to have intercourse without committing yourself — in such a schizoid world, which young people experience more directly since they have not had time to build up the defenses which dull the senses of their elders, it is not surprising that will and love have become increasingly problematic and even, as some people believe, impossible of achievement.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness.

Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.

The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.

There is no meaningful “yes” unless the individual could also have said “no.”

The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all his adversaries is the last thing on earth he wishes: their extermination would deprive him and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies — being human — also have and could share with him. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with our enemies, we are the poorer.

Communication leads to community — that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking.

Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood.

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.

When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” … this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

English Proverbs

Jun 022010
 

If you have heard of any more English Proverbs please let me know by contacting me.

A

A bad settlement is better than a good lawsuit.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

A bad penny always turns up.

A bellyful is one of meat, drink, or sorrow.

A big tree attracts the woodsman’s axe.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

A bad workman blames his tools.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

A burnt child dreads the fire.

A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.

A little pot is easily hot.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.

A closed mouth catches no flies.

A constant guest is never welcome.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

A good man in an evil society seems the greatest villain of all.

A jack of all trades is master of none.

A loaded wagon makes no noise.

A miss by an inch is a miss by a mile.

A paragraph should be like a lady’s skirt: long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to keep it interesting.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

A rising tide lifts all boats

A stitch in time saves nine.

A thief thinks everyone steals.

A watched pot never boils.

A woman’s work is never done.

A woman is like a cup of tea; you’ll never know how strong she is until she boils.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Act today only, tomorrow is too late

Actions speak louder than words.

Advice most needed is least heeded.

All cats love fish but hate to get their paws wet.

All roads lead to Rome.

All’s well that ends well.

All that glisters is not gold.

ll things come to those who wait.

Always care about your flowers and your friends. Otherwise they’ll fade, and soon your house will be empty.

A man’s home is his castle.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

An empty vessel makes the most noise.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

As fit as a fiddle.

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

As soon as a man is born, he begins to die.

Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.

B

Bad news travels fast.

Barking dogs seldom bite.

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

Before criticizing a man, walk a mile in his shoes.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Better late than never.

Better safe than sorry.

Birds of a feather flock together.

Bitter pills may have blessed effects.

Blood is thicker than water.

Blood will out.

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

Boys will be boys.

Brain is better than brawn.

Buy the best and you only cry once.

C

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.

D

A dull pencil is greater than the sharpest memory.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Different strokes for different folks.

Do it today, tomorrow it may be against the law.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Don’t ask God to guide your footsteps if you’re not willing to move your feet.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Don’t burn your bridges.

Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

Don’t cry over spilled milk.

Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.

Don’t enter your nose in the affairs of others.

Don’t judge a man by the size of his hat, but by the angle of his tilt.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.

Don’t put the cart before the horse.

Don’t raise more Demons than you can lay down.

Don’t shut the barn door after the horse is gone.

Don’t take life too seriously; you’ll never get out of it alive.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Don’t let procrastination eat your own clock.

Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.

E

The early bird catches the worm. But the second mouse gets the cheese.

Even a dog can distinguish between being stumbled over and being kicked.

Every dog has its day.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Everything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.

Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines

Everything can be justified until it happens to you.

Every rose has its thorn.

F

Failure is the stepping stone for success.

Falling down does not signify failure but staying there does.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Forewarned is forearmed.

From those to whom much is given, much is expected.

Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

G

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Give credit where credit is due.

Give a man an inch and he’ll take a yard.

God takes care of drunks.

Great events cast their shadows before them.

Great oaks from little acorns grow.

Green leaves and brown leaves fall from the same tree.

H

Home is where the heart is.

He laughs best who laughs last.

I

I complained I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.

I think, therefore I am.

I came, I saw, I conquered.

It is better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees.

If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well.

If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is.

If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets.

If you cross your bridges before you come to them, you will have to pay the toll twice.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Ignorance is bliss.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

In order to get where you want to go, you first have to leave where you are.

In the mind of thieves the moon is always shining.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

It’s always darkest before the dawn

It never rains, but it pours.

It takes all kinds to make the world go round.

It takes two to tango.

It’s better to be safe than sorry.

It’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean.

If you fall off a cliff, you might as well try to fly. After all, you got nothing to lose.

J

Jack of all trades and master of none.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

K

Knowledge is power.

Kindness, like grain, increase by sowing.

L

Laugh when you’re happy, cry when you’re sad, and do both when you’re the happiest you’ve ever been.

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

Learn to walk before you run.

Least said sooner mended.

Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.

Life is a perception of your own reality.

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

Give a man a match, he shall be warm for a moment. Light a man on fire and he shall be warm for the rest of his life.

Long absent, soon forgotten.

Look before you leap.

M

Man is truly himself when he’s alone.

Many things are lost for want of asking.

Money cannot buy happiness.

Money can’t buy everything, but everything needs money

N

Nature, time, and patience are three great physicians.

Never change, for the sake of others. There will be no one like you if you change.

No man can serve two masters.

No money, no justice.

No news is good news.

No pain, no gain.

O

One grain of sand can tip the scale.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

One murder makes a villain, millions a hero.

One rotten apple will spoil the whole barrel.

Only losers say “Winning isn’t everything.”

Opinions are like assholes: everyone has them and they usually stink.

P

Patience is a virtue.

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Procrastination is the thief of time.

Proverbs are long life experiences, told in one short sentence.

S

Someone who gossips to you will gossip about you.

Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

Stolen fruit is the sweetest.

Some days you get the bear, other days the bear gets you.

T

The rotten apple injures its neighbors.

That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.

The belly has no ears.

The customer is always right.

The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

The world is your oyster.

There are so many things to say that are better left unsaid.

There’s always a calm before a storm.

There’s no place like home.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Tomorrow is another day.

The worst way to miss someone is to be sitting right beside them knowing you can’t have them.

The more you study, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. The less you know the more you study.

V

Virtue which parleys is near a surrender.

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

W

Walk the walk and talk the talk.

Waste not, want not.

What goes up must come down.

What you see is what you get.

What you sow is what you reap.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle.

Y

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

You reap what you sow.

C. Wright Mills Quotes

May 162010
 

To have peace and not war, the drift toward a war economy, as facilitated by the moves and the demands of the sophisticated conservatives, must be stopped; to have peace without slump, the tactics and policies of the practical right must be overcome. The political and economic power of both must be broken. The power of these giants of main drift is both economically and politically anchored; both unions and an independent labor party are needed to struggle effective.

The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness.
We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
We feel that distrust has become nearly universal among men of affairs, and that the spread of public anxiety is poisoning human relations and drying up the roots of private freedom.We see that people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity, and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom-the forced actors who take the consequences-are also without leaders, without ideas of opposition, and that they make no real demands upon those with power.

Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the ‘votes of the majority,’ the ‘will of the people,’ the ‘aristocracy of talents or wealth,’ to the ‘divine right of kings’ or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.

Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else’s terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues — and in terms of the problems of history making.

One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker

The economy – once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated… The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered… The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.

The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all pervasive distrust and self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one man to another in transient contact has been made subtle in a dozen ways, and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and relations. People are required by the salesman ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. In the course of time, and as this ethic spreads, it is got on to. Still, it is conformed to as part of one;s job and one’s style of life, but now with a winking eye, for one knows that manipulation is inherent in every human contact. Men are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of himself and is estranged from it also.

Kindness and friendliness become aspects of personalized service or of public relations of big firms, rationalized to further the sale of something. With anonymous insincerity, the Successful Person thus makes an instrument of his own appearance and personality.

In a society of employees dominated by the marketing mentality, it is inevitable that a personality market should arise. For in the great shift from manual skills to the art of ‘handling’, selling and servicing people, personal or even intimate traits of employees are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become commodities in the labor market.

Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father’s store or farm.

Every revolution has its counterrevolution — that is a sign the revolution is for real. And every revolution must defend itself against this counterrevolution, or the revolution will fail.

If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.

To really belong, we have got, first, to get it clear with ourselves that we do not belong and do not want to belong to an unfree world. As free men and women we have got to reject much of it and to know why we are rejecting it.

The point is that we are among those who cannot get their mouths around all the little Yeses that add up to tacit acceptance of a world run by crackpot realists and subject to blind drift. And that, you see, is something to which we do belong; we belong to those who are still capable of personally rejecting. Our minds are not yet captive.

If we accept the Greek’s definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now idiots. And I should not be surprised, although I don’t know, if there were some such idiots even in Germany.

Stanislav Andreski Quotes

May 162010
 

So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.

Laughter is a mental mechanism which enables us to face reality without falling into despondency or delusion. As people who have sunk in apathy seldom bother us by rushing into print, delusion (leaving aside deceit) constitutes the chief obstacle to the progress of our understanding of society, and in this context is usually assumes the form of doctrinairism couched in a mystifying jargon. A sense of humour is the most reliable external indicator of the likelihood of immunity from this folly, and of the ability to appraise social situations realistically.

Sacrifice has always been regarded as the most convincing proof of loyalty; and its most common form involves a foregoing of the use of some organic function, as in the case of celibacy or fasting. Of at least equal significance, however, is a sacrifice of the use of reason – credo quia impossibile – and the more incredible the assertion, the stronger the proof of the devotion manifested by its acceptance. The Catholic theologians are quite explicit about this, and openly say that by affirming what to the human reason appears absurd, a believer proves his love for God. Although they are never so frank about it, the secular sects make similar demands.

Contrary to what many romantically inclined critics of contemporary civilization say about the dehumanizing effects of machines, I believe that contact with machines (particularly complicated machines) exercises a profoundly humanizing influence in the sense of making people less brutal. The reason for that is very simple: machines do not respond to shouting and beating — to make them work one has to think and be patient. In contrast, the use of animals offers a standing lesson in the advantages of brutality — one has only to reflect upon the fact that in an industrialized country people do not carry whips.

The natural sciences did not advance in virtue of the universal appeal of rationality. Their theological, classicist and metaphysical opponents were not converted but displaced. All the ancient universities had to be compelled by outside pressure to make room for science; and most nation began to appreciate it only after succumbing to the weapons produced with its aid. To cut a long story short, scientific method has triumphed throughout the world because it bestowed upon those who practised it power over those who did not. Sorcery lost not because of any waning of its intrinsic appeal to the human mind, but because it failed to match the power created by science. But, though abandoned as a tool for controlling nature, incantations remain more effective for manipulating crowds than logical arguments, so that in the conduct of human affairs sorcery continues to be stronger than science.

Edward Bernays Quotes

May 162010
 

The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed.

The best defense against propaganda: more propaganda.

It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.

For the same reason I read the National Geographic, I like to see places I will never visit.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed.

The best place to find things: the public library.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.

This is an age of mass production. In the mass production of materials a broad technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In this age, too, there must be a technique for the mass distribution of ideas. A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.

The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.

Jacques Ellul Quotes

May 122010
 

Faith lived in the incognito is one which is located outside the criticism coming from society, from politics, from history, for the very reason that it has itself the vocation to be a source of criticism. It is faith (lived in the incognito) which triggers the issues for the others, which causes everything seemingly established to be placed in doubt, which drives a wedge into the world of false assurances.

I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history.

People think that they have no right to judge a fact — all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact.

True technique will know how to maintain the illusion of liberty, choice, and individuality.

The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide. We must not accept this suicide, and we must so act that it cannot take place.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.

Here, then, is one of the elements of weakness of this point of view. It does not perceive technique’s rigorous autonomy with respect to morals; it does not see that the infusion of some more or less vague sentiment of human welfare cannot alter it. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. This attitude supposes further that technique evolves with some end in view, and that this end is human good. Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed.

In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint of the organization will no longer be felt by him; the truth is, it will no longer be a constraint, and the police will have nothing to do. The civic and technological good will and the enthusiasm for the right social myths — both created by propaganda — will finally have solved the problem of man.

The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass. It is at this point that propaganda can be most effective.

Propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal — the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. Modern propaganda must utilize all of these media. There is no propaganda as long as one makes use, in sporadic fashion and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, organizes a few meetings and lectures, writes a few slogans on walls: that is not propaganda.

…because of the myth of progress, it is much easier to sell a man an electric razor than a straight-edged one.

Having analyzed these traits, we can now advance a definition of propaganda – not an exhaustive definition, unique and exclusive of all others, but at least a partial one: Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.

The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action.

Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.

Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

In point of fact there are a certain number of values and of forces which are of decisive importance in our world civilization: the primacy of production, the continual growth of the power of the State and the formation of the National State, the autonomous development of technics, etc. These, among others — far more than the ownership of the means of production or any totalitarian doctrine — are the constitutive elements of the modern world. So long as these elements continue to be taken for granted, the world is standing still.

Ferdinand Foch Quotes

May 122010
 

Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value.

The military art is not an accomplishment, an art for dilettante, a sport. You do not make war without reason, without an object, as you would give yourself up to music, painting, hunting, lawn tennis, where there is no great harm done whether you stop altogether or go on, whether you do little or much. Everything in war is linked together, is mutually interdependent, mutually interpenetrating. When you are at war you have no power to act at random. Each operation has a raison d’etre, that is an object; that object, once determined, fixes the nature and the value of the means to be resorted to as well as the use which ought to be made of the forces.

One does simply what one can in order to apply what one knows.

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

There is but one means to extenuate the effects of enemy fire: it is to develop a more violent fire oneself.

The laurels of victory are at the point of the enemy bayonets. They must be plucked there; they must be carried by a hand-to-hand fight if one really means to conquer.

In tactics, action is the governing rule of war.

An army is to a chief what a sword is to a soldier. It is only worth anything in so far as it receives from him a certain impulsion (direction and vigour).

The distribution of troops devoted to the defence of a place includes a garrison, an occupying force, numerically as weak as possible; a reserve as strong as possible, designed for counterattacking and for providing itself, at the moment it goes into action, with a security service which will guard it from any possible surprise.

The truth is, no study is possible on the battle-field; one does there simply what one can in order to apply what one knows. Therefore, in order to do even a little, one has already to know a great deal and to know it well.

The unknown is the governing condition of war.

In war there are none but particular cases; everything has there an individual nature; nothing ever repeats itself. In the first place, the data of a military problem are but seldom certain; they are never final. Everything is in a constant state of change and reshaping.

Every manoeuvre must be the development of a scheme; it must aim at a goal.

In a time such as ours when people believe they can do without an ideal, cast away what they call abstract ideas, live on realism, rationalism, positivism, reduce everything to knowledge or to the use of more or less ingenious and casual devices — let us acknowledge it here — in such a time there is only one means of avoiding error, crime, disaster, of determining the conduct to be followed on a given occasion — but a safe means it is, and a fruitful one; this is the exclusive devotion to two abstract notions in the field of ethics: duty and discipline; such a devotion, if it is to lead to happy results, further implies besides… knowledge and reasoning.

To be disciplined does not mean being silent, abstaining, or doing only what one thinks one may undertake without risk; it is not the art of eluding responsibility; it means acting in compliance with orders received, and therefore finding in one’s own mind, by effort and reflection, the possibility to carry out such orders. It also means finding in one’s own will the energy to face the risks involved in execution.

When the moment arrives for taking decisions, facing responsibilities, entering upon sacrifices — decisions which ought to be taken before they are imposed, responsibilities which ought to be welcomed, for the initiative must be secured and the offensive launched — where should we find a man equal to these uncertain and dangerous tasks were it not among men of a superior stamp, men eager for responsibilities? He must indeed be a man who, being deeply imbued with a will to conquer, shall derive from that will (as well as from a clear perception of the only means that lead to victory) the strength to make an unwavering use of the most formidable rights, to approach with courage all difficulties and all sacrifices, to risk everything; even honour — for a beaten general is disgraced for ever.

My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.

To inform, and, therefore to reconnoitre, this is the first and constant duty of the advanced guard.

The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.

I am conscious of having served England as I served my own country.

Suicide Quotes

May 122010
 

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
- Antonin Artaud

“You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.”
- Chuck Palahniuk

I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.
- Damien Hirst

There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.
- Daniel Webster

Bravest at the last, She levelled at our purposes, and being royal, Took her own way.
- Shakespeare

If suicide be supposed a crime, it is only cowardice can impel us to it. If it be no crime, both prudence and courage should engage us to rid ourselves at once of existence when it becomes a burden. It is the only way that we can then be useful to society, by setting an example which, if imitated, would preserve every one his chance for happiness in life, and would effectually free him from all danger or misery.
- Hume

In short, all suicides of the insane are either devoid of any motive or determined by purely imaginary motives. Now, many voluntary deaths fall into neither category; the majority have motives, and motives not unfounded in reality. Not every suicide can therefore be considered insane, without doing violence to language.
- Émile Durkheim

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.
- Émile Durkheim

It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
- Émile Durkheim

To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
- Émile Durkheim

Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.
- Cotton

The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Life is like a movie, if you’ve sat through more than half of it and its sucked every second so far, it probably isn’t gonna get great right at the end and make it all worthwhile. None should blame you for walking out early.
- Doug Stanhope

Suicide is man’s way of telling God, “You can’t fire me – I quit.”
- Bill Maher

Émile Durkheim Quotes

May 122010
 

In the name of the dogma of struggle for existence and natural selection, they paint for us in the saddest colors this primitive humanity whose hunger and thirst, always badly satisfied, were their only passions; those sombre times when men had no other care and no other occupation than to quarrel with one another over their miserable nourishment. To react against those retrospective reveries of the philosophy of the eighteenth century and also against certain religious doctrines, to show with some force that the paradise lost is not behind us and that there is in our past nothing to regret, they believe we ought to make it dreary and belittle it systematically. Nothing is less scientific than this prejudice in the opposite direction. If the hypotheses of Darwin have a moral use, it is with more reserve and measure than in other sciences. They overlook the essential element of moral life, that is, the moderating influence that society exercises over its members, which tempers and neutralizes the brutal action of the struggle for existence and selection. Wherever there are societies, there is altruism, because there is solidarity.

Now, it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or less extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witness. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?

Man’s characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body’s yoke, but is subject to that of society.

To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.

It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

In short, all suicides of the insane are either devoid of any motive or determined by purely imaginary motives. Now, many voluntary deaths fall into neither category; the majority have motives, and motives not unfounded in reality. Not every suicide can therefore be considered insane, without doing violence to language.

There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.

Alexandre Dumas Quotes

May 122010
 

Nothing succeeds like success.

And now, farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude… I have substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked.

The chains of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them; sometimes three.

Sleeping on a plank has one advantage – it encourages early rising.

All for one, one for all, that is our motto.

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more

Drunk, if you like; so much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.

There is … a clever maxim which bears upon what I was saying to you some little while ago, and that is, that unless wicked ideas take root in a naturally depraved mind, human nature, in a right and wholesome state, revolts at crime. Still, from an artificial civilisation have originated wants, vices, and false tastes, which occasionally become so powerful as to stifle within us all good feelings, and ultimately to lead us into guilt and wickedness…

“You must teach me a small part of what you know,” said Dantes, “if only to prevent your growing weary of me. I can well believe that so learned a person as yourself would prefer absolute solitude to being tormented with the company of one as ignorant and uninformed as myself. If you will only agree to my request, I promise you never to mention another word about escaping.” The abbe smiled. “Alas, my boy,” said he, “human knowledge is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself. Now, it will scarcely require two years for me to communicate to you the stock of learning I possess.”
“Two years!” exclaimed Dantes; “do you really believe I can acquire all these things in so short a time?”
“Not their application, certainly, but their principles you may; to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other.”

“We are never quits with those who oblige us,” was Dantes’ reply; “for when we do not owe them money, we owe them gratitude.”

“How strange,” continued the king, with some asperity; “the police think that they have disposed of the whole matter when they say, ‘A murder has been committed,’ and especially so when they can add, ‘And we are on the track of the guilty persons.’”

Private misfortunes must never induce us to neglect public affairs.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain Quotes

May 122010
 

We find that actual, concrete knowledge, that is, the great work of toilsome discovery, has one deadly enemy, omniscience. The Jews are a case in point; if a man possesses a sacred book, which contains all wisdom, then all further investigation is as superfluous as it is sinful: the Christian Church took over the Jewish tradition. This fastening on to Judaism, which was so fatal for our history, is being accomplished before our very eyes; it can be demonstrated step by step. The old Church Fathers, taking their stand expressly upon the Jewish Torah, are unanimous in preaching contempt of art and of science.

Certain anthropologists would fain teach us that all races are equally gifted; we point to history and answer: that is a lie! The races of mankind are markedly different in the nature and also in the extent of their gifts, and the Germanic races belong to the most highly gifted group, the group usually termed Aryan… Physically and mentally the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right … the lords of the world. Do we not see the homo syriacus develop just as well and as happily in the position of slave as of master? Do the Chinese not show us another example of the same nature?

Their existence is sin, their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life. (About Jews)

..I say, therefore, that the men who founded Judaism were not impelled by evil, selfish motives, but goaded on by a demoniacal power…

All historically great races and nations have been produced by mixing; but wherever the difference of type is too great to be bridged over, then we have mongrels. That is the case here. The crossing between Bedouin and Syrian was — from an anatomical point of view — probably worse than that between Spaniard and South American Indian.

To call the Germans a ‘nation of thinkers’ is bitter irony; a nation of soldiers and shopkeepers would certainly be more correct…

In the eyes of God all men, indeed all creatures, may be equal: but the divine law of the individual is to maintain and to defend his individuality.

I have never understood why Catholics of culture take pains to deny or to explain away the fact that the Roman Church is not only a religion but also a secular system of government, and that the Church as representative of God upon earth may eo ipso claim — and always has claimed — absolute power in all things of this world.

Not only the Jew, but also all that is derived from the Jewish mind, corrodes and disintegrates what is best in us.

This will to live was the first thing that Judaism gave to Christianity: hence that contradiction, which even today seems to many an inexplicable riddle, between a doctrine of inner conversion, toleration and mercifulness, and a religion of exclusive self-assertion and fanatical intolerance.

Noam Chromsky Quotes

Apr 212010
 

American Political Philosopher (7/12/1928 -  (  /  /   ).

You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean, the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible – not only did He order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide – I mean, wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert – not only did He do things like that, but, after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That’s the story of Noah. I mean, that’s beyond genocide – you don’t know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive – that’s supposed to be gentle and wonderful.

Capitalism is basically a system where everything is for sale, and the more money you have, the more you can get. And, in particular, that’s true of freedom. Freedom is one of the commodities that is for sale, and if you are affluent, you can have a lot of it. It shows up in all sorts of ways. It shows up if you get in trouble with the law, let’s say, or in any aspect of life it shows up. And for that reason it makes a lot of sense, if you accept capitalist system, to try to accumulate property, not just because you want material welfare, but because that guarantees your freedom, it makes it possible for you to amass that commodity. [...] what you’re going to find is that the defense of free institutions will largely be in the hands of those who benefit from them, namely the wealthy, and the powerful. They can purchase that commodity and, therefore, they want those institutions to exist, like free press, and all that.

The political policies that are called conservative these days would appall any genuine conservative, if there were one around to be appalled. For example, the central policy of the Reagan Administration – which was supposed to be conservative – was to build up a powerful state. The state grew in power more under Reagan than in any peacetime period, even if you just measure it by state expenditures. The state intervention in the economy vastly increased. That’s what the Pentagon system is, in fact; it’s the creation of a state-guaranteed market and subsidy system for high-technology production. There was a commitment under the Reagan Administration to protect this more powerful state from the public, which is regarded as the domestic enemy. Take the resort to clandestine operations in foreign policy: that means the creation of a powerful central state immune from public inspection. Or take the increased efforts at censorship and other forms of control. All of these are called “conservatism,” but they’re the very opposite of conservatism. Whatever the term means, it involves a concern for Enlightenment values of individual rights and freedoms against powerful external authorities such as the state, a dominant Church, and so on. That kind of conservatism no one even remembers anymore.

Personally I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can’t have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level — there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.

It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state. Those who choose to disregard this responsibility can justly be accused of complicity in war crimes, which is itself designated as ‘a crime under international law’ in the principles of the Charter of Nuremberg.

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in the classic formulation. Now, it has long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist, with whatever suffering and injustice that it entails, as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history either one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elite should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must — namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival.

A lot of sophistication has been developed about the utilization of machines for complex purposes, and it doesn’t make sense not to use it if you can think of a good question to ask. Playing chess is about the dumbest question you can ask. But, if you want, maybe can make money that way, or something. In fact, what’s going on with the chess is about as interesting as the fact that a front-end loader can lift more than an Olympics champion, weight lifter, or something. Probably so, but, you know, these are just not serious questions.

Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to “subservience and venality”, and will “suffocate[s] the germs of virtue”. And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles. There’s a modern perversion of conservatism and libertarianism, which has changed the meanings of words, pretty much the way Orwell discussed. So nowadays, dependence refers to something else. When you listen to what’s going in Congress, and people talk about dependence, what they mean by dependence is public support for hungry children, not wage labor. Dependence is support for hungry children and mothers who are caring for them. [...] We see this very dramatically right at this moment in Congress, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, who quite demonstrably is the leading welfare freak in the country. He is the most avid advocate of welfare in the country, except he wants it to go to the rich. His own district in Cobb County Georgia gets more federal subsidies than any suburban county in the country, outside of the federal system itself… And it’s supposed to continue, because this kind of welfare dependency is good. Dependent children, that’s bad. But dependent executives, that’s good. You gotta make sure they keep feeding at the public trough. [...] the nation is not an entity, it’s divided into economic classes, and the architects of policy are those who have the economic power. In his days, he said, the merchants and manufacturers of England, who make sure that their interests are “most peculiarly attended to”, like Gingrich. Whatever the effect on others, including the people of England. To Adam Smith, that was a truism. To James Madison, that was a truism. Nowadays, you’re supposed to recoil in horror and call it vulgar Marxism or something, meaning that Adam Smith and James Madison must have been disciples of Marx. And if you believe the rest of the story, you might as well believe that. But those are facts which you can easily discover if you bothered reading the sacred texts, that you’re supposed to worship, but not read.

I should say that when people talk about capitalism it’s a bit of a joke. There’s no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. That’s right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. That’s very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World.

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

“Tough love” is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn’t interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don’t have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it’s very different from other rights.

Roughly speaking, I think it’s accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure. The people, so-called, do exercise an occasional choice among those who Marx once called “the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling class.”

Well, law is a bit like a printing press — it’s kind of neutral, you can make it do anything. I mean, what lawyers are taught in law school is chicanery: how to convert words on paper into instruments of power. And depending where the power is, the law will mean different things.

The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that’s happening.

Remember, every business firm, like even a mom and pop grocery store, is a market imperfection. A firm is defined in economic theory as a market imperfection introduced to deal with transaction costs. And the sort of theory is that the imperfections, the firms, are kinda like little islands in a free market sea. But the problem with that is that the sea doesn’t remotely resemble a free market, and the islands are bigger than the sea; so that raises some questions about the picture. But these market imperfections, like a firm, or a transnational corporation, or a strategic alliance among them, this is a form of administering interchanges. And there’s a real question about whether we want to accept that. Why, for example, should the international socioeconomic system, or for that matter our own society, be in the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies? That’s a decision, it’s not a law of nature.

No individual gets up and says, I’m going to take this because I want it. He’d say, I’m going to take it because it really belongs to me and it would be better for everyone if I had it. It’s true of children fighting over toys. And it’s true of governments going to war. Nobody is ever involved in an aggressive war; it’s always a defensive war — on both sides.

If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.

Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it’s exactly what you’re taught to do in college. If you take an economics or a political science course, you’re taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market. The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it’s called democratic. Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don’t have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren’s interests is being irrational, because what you’re supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.

In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they’re really factions of the same party, the Business Party. Both represent some range of business interests. In fact, they can change their positions 180 degrees, and nobody even notices. In the 1984 election, for example, there was actually an issue, which often there isn’t. The issue was Keynesian growth versus fiscal conservatism. The Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth: big spending, deficits, and so on. The Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism: watch the money supply, worry about the deficits, et cetera. Now, I didn’t see a single comment pointing out that the two parties had completely reversed their traditional positions. Traditionally, the Democrats are the party of Keynesian growth, and the Republicans the party of fiscal conservatism. So doesn’t it strike you that something must have happened? Well, actually, it makes sense. Both parties are essentially the same party. The only question is how coalitions of investors have shifted around on tactical issues now and then. As they do, the parties shift to opposite positions, within a narrow spectrum.

If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist — it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.

Nothing should be done to impede people from teaching and doing their research even if at that very moment it was being used to massacre and destroy. The radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus, on the principle that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be open and above board, so that people would know what is happening and act accordingly.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries, who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

During the early stages of the industrial revolution, as England was coming out of a feudal-type of society and into what’s basically a state-capitalist system, the rising bourgeoisie there had a problem. In a traditional society like the feudal system, people had a certain place, and they had certain rights – in fact, they had what was called at the time a “right to live.” I mean, under feudalism it may have been a lousy right, but nevertheless people were assumed to have some natural entitlement for survival. But with the rise of what we call capitalism, that right had to be destroyed: people had to have it knocked out of their heads that they had any automatic “right to live” beyond what they could win for themselves on the labor market. And that was the main point of classical economics. Remember the context in which all of this was taking place: classical economics developed after a period in which a large part of the English population had been forcibly driven off the land they had been farming for centuries – that was by force, it wasn’t a pretty picture. In fact, very likely one of the main reasons why England led the industrial revolution was just that they had been more violent in driving people off the land than in other places. For instance, in France a lot of people were able to remain on the land, and therefore they resisted industrialization more. But even after the rising bourgeoisie in England had driven millions of peasants off the land, there was a period when the population’s “right to live” still was preserved by what we would today call “welfare.” There was a set of laws in England which gave people rights, called the “Poor Laws” – which essentially kept you alive if you couldn’t survive otherwise; they provided sort of a minimum level of subsistence, like subsidies on food and so on. And there was something called the “Corn Laws”, which gave landlords certain rights beyond those they could get on the market – they raised the price of corn, that sort of thing. And together, these laws were considered among the main impediments to the new rising British industrial class – so therefore they just had to go. Well, those people needed an ideology to support their effort to knock out of people’s heads the idea that they had this basic right to live, and that’s what classical economics was about – classical economics said: no one has any right to live, you only have a right to what you gain for yourself on the labor market. And the founders of classical economics in fact said they’d developed a “scientific theory” of it, with – as they put it – “the certainty of the principle of gravitation.” Alright, by the 1830s, political conditions in England had changed enough so that the rising bourgeoisie were able to kill the Poor Laws, and then later they managed to do away with the Corn Laws. And by around 1840 or 1845, they won the elections and took over the government. Then at that point, a very interesting thing happened. They gave up the theory, and Political Economy changed. It changed for a number of reasons. For one thing, these guys had won, so they didn’t need it so much as an ideological weapon anymore. For another, they recognized that they themselves needed a powerful interventionist state to defend industry from the hardships of competition in the open market – as they always had in fact. And beyond that, eliminating people’s “right to live” was starting to have some negative side-effects. First of all, it was causing riots all over the place: for a long period, the British army was mostly preoccupied with putting down riots across England. Then something even worse happened – the population started to organize: you got the beginnings of an organized labor movement, and later the Chartist movement, and then a socialist movement developed. And at that point, the elites in England recognized that the game just had to be called off, or else they really would be in trouble – so by the time you get to the second half of the nineteenth century, things like John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, which gives kind of a social-democratic line, were becoming the reigning ideology. See, the “science” happens to be a very flexible one: you can change it to do whatever you feel like, it’s that kind of “science.” So by the middle of the nineteenth century, the “science” had changed, and now it turned out that laissez-faire was a bad thing after all – and what you got instead were the intellectual foundations for what’s called the “welfare state.” And in fact, for a century afterwards, “laissez faire” was basically a dirty word – nobody talked about it anymore. And what the “science” now said was that you had better give the population some way of surviving, or else they’re going to challenge your right to rule. You can take away their right to live, but then they’re going to take away your right to rule – and that’s no good, so ways have to be found to accommodate them. Well, it wasn’t until recent years that laissez-faire ideology was revived again – and again, it was a weapon of class warfare. As far as I can see, the principles of classical economics in effect are still taught: I don’t think what’s taught in the University of Chicago Economics Department today is all that different, what’s called “neo-liberalism”. And it doesn’t have any more validity than it had in the early nineteenth century – in fact, it has even less. At least in the early nineteenth century, Ricardo’s and Malthus’ assumptions had some relation to reality. Today those assumptions have no relation to reality. Look: the basic assumption of the classical economists was that labor is highly mobile and capital is relatively immobile – that’s required, that’s crucial to proving all their nice theorems. That was the reason they could say, “If you can’t get enough to survive on the labor market, go someplace else” – because you could go someplace else: after the native populations of places like the United States and Australia and Tasmania were exterminated or driven away, then yeah, poor Europeans could go someplace else. So in the early nineteenth century, labor was indeed mobile. And back then, capital was indeed immobile – first because “capital” primarily meant land, and you can’t move land, and also because the extent that there was investment, it was very local: like, you didn’t have communications systems that allowed for easy transfers of money all around the world, like we do today. So in the early nineteenth century, the assumption that labor is mobile and capital is immobile was more or less realistic – and on the basis of that assumption, you could try to prove things about comparative advantage and all this stuff you learn in school about Portugal and wine and so on. Incidentally, if you want to know how well those theorems actually work, just compare Portugal and England after a hundred years of trying them out – growing wine versus industrializing as possible modes of development. But let’s put that aside… Well, by now the assumptions underpinning these theories are not only false – they’re the opposite of the truth. By now labor is immobile, through immigration restrictions and so on, and capital is highly mobile, primarily because of technological changes. So none of the results work anymore. But you’re still taught them, you’re still taught the theories exactly as before – even though the reality today is the exact opposite of what we assumed in the early nineteenth century. I mean, if you look at some of the fancier economists, Paul Krugman and so on, they’ve got all kinds of little tricks here and there to make the results not quite so grotesquely ridiculous as they’d otherwise be. But fundamentally, it all just is pretty ridiculous. If capital is mobile and labor is immobile, there’s no reason why mobile capital shouldn’t seek absolute advantage and play one national workforce against another, go wherever the labor is cheapest and thereby drive everybody’s standard of living down. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re doing in NAFTA and all these other international trade agreements which are being instituted right now. Nothing in these abstract economic models actually works in the real world. It doesn’t matter how many footnotes they put in, or how many ways they tinker around the edges. The whole enterprise is totally rotten at the core: it has no relation to reality anymore – and furthermore, it never did.

So long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody, has to be committed to one overriding goal: and that’s to make sure that the rich folk are happy — because unless they are, nobody else is going to get anything. So if you’re a homeless person sleeping in the streets of Manhattan, let’s say, your first concern must be that the guys in the mansions are happy — because if they’re happy, then they’ll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, and then maybe something will trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they’re not happy, everything’s going to grind to a halt, and you’re not even going to get anything trickling down.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

If you had asked my grandmother whether she is oppressed, she probably wouldn’t have understood what you are talking about; that’s life. If you’d asked my mother, you’d have found that she resented it, but accepted it, as life. If you’d ask my daughters, they’d tell you to get lost. That reflects hard-won victories for freedom.

I mean, what’s the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you’re trained to be a ruler – they both can run because they’re financed by the same corporate institutions. At the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama said, ‘only in this country, only in America, could someone like me appear here.’ Well, in some other countries, people much poorer than him would not only talk at the convention – they’d be elected president. Take Lula. The president of Brazil is a guy with a peasant background, a union organizer, never went to school, he’s the president of the second-biggest country in the hemisphere. Only in America? I mean, there they actually have elections where you can choose somebody from your own ranks. With different policies. That’s inconceivable in the United States.

There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It’s a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It’s not that scientists are more honest people. It’s just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it’ll be refuted tomorrow.

In fact, just take a look at the history of “trucking and bartering” itself; look at the history of modern capitalism, about which we know a lot. The first thing you’ll notice is, peasants had to be driven by force and violence into a wage-labor system they did not want; then major efforts were undertaken – conscious efforts – to create wants. In fact, if you look back, there’s a whole interesting literature of conscious discussion of the need to manufacture wants in the general population. It’s happened over the whole long stretch of capitalism of course, but one place where you can see it very nicely encapsulated is around the time when slavery was terminated. It’s very dramatic too at cases like these. For example, in 1831 there was a big slave revolt in Jamaica – which was one of the things that led the British to decide to give up slavery in their colonies: after some slave revolts, they basically said, “It’s not paying anymore.” So within a couple of years the British wanted to move from a slave economy to a so-called “free” economy, but they still wanted the basic structure to remain exactly the same – and if you take a look back at the parliamentary debates in England at the time, they were talking very consciously about all this. They were saying: look, we’ve got to keep it the way it is, the masters have to become the owners, the slave have to become the happy workers – somehow we’ve got to work it all out. Well, there was a little problem in Jamaica: since there was a lot of open land there, when the British let the slaves go free they just wanted to move out onto the land and be perfectly happy, they didn’t want to work for the British sugar plantations anymore. So what everyone was asking in Parliament in London was, “How can we force them to keep working for us, even when they’re no longer enslaved into it?” Alright, two things were decided upon: first, they would use state force to close off the open land and prevent people from going and surviving on their own. And secondly, they realized that since all these workers didn’t really want a lot of things – they just wanted to satisfy their basic needs, which they could easily do in that tropical climate – the British capitalists would have to start creating a whole set of wants for them, and make them start desiring things they didn’t then desire, so then the only way they’d be able to satisfy their new material desires would be by working for wages in the British sugar plantations. There was very conscious discussion of the need to create wants – and in fact, extensive efforts were then undertaken to do exactly what they do on T.V. today: to create wants, to make you want the latest pair of sneakers you don’t really need, so then people will be driven into a wage-labor society. And that pattern has been repeated over and over again through the whole entire history of capitalism. In fact, what the whole history of capitalism shows is that people have had to be driven into situations which are then claimed to be their nature. But if the history of capitalism shows anything, it shows it’s not their nature, that they’ve had to be forced into it, and that that effort has had to be maintained right until this day.

Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we’re educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don’t educate them, what we call “education,” they’re going to take control — “they” being what Alexander Hamilton called the “great beast,” namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

There’s a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

If any of you have ever looked at your FBI file, you discover that intelligence agencies in general are extremely incompetent. That’s one of the reasons why there are so many intelligence failures. They just never get anything straight, for all kinds of reasons. Part of it is because of the information they get. The information they get comes from ideological fanatics, typically, who always misunderstand things in their own crazy way. If you look at an FBI file, say, about yourself, where you know what the facts are, you’ll see that the information has some kind of relation to the facts, you can figure out what they’re talking about, but by the time it works its way through the ideological fanaticism of the intelligence agencies, there’s always weird distortion.

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you’re saying, because it’s too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you’ve resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, “You’re an asshole,” which maybe he or she is, and if you don’t say, “That’s idiotic,” when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.

Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That’s pretty obvious. You can’t have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case…

In a dictatorship, taxation is theft. In a true democratic community, people make decisions, including decisions about how to deal with problems of concern to the community, like schools, health services, transportation, etc. Insofar as this leads to expenditures, they make decisions about taxes or some counterpart. There is no theft. Societies like ours are somewhere in between. To take your case, suppose your neighbor never uses a road or a bus at the other end of town. Why should he fund it? Maybe we should each just pay for the roads we use — and that means, of course, that we have to prevent others from using them, so we hire private armies, and if someone comes along with a bigger army we get nuclear weapons to keep them from using our road, and… Actually, proposals like this are made, in all seriousness, in literature that is taken seriously. And it extends to everything else, leading to a world in which no sane person would want to live, even if it would be possible to survive in it.

I’m of course opposed to terror, any rational person is, but I think that if we’re serious about the question of terror and serious about the question of violence we have to recognize that it is a tactical and hence moral matter. Incidentally, tactical issues are basically moral issues, they have to do with human consequences. And if we’re interested in let’s say diminishing the amount of violence in the world, it’s at least arguable and sometimes true that a terroristic act does diminish the amount of violence in the world hence a person who is opposed to violence will not be opposed to that terroristic act.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

Because they don’t teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.

The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind. But that this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt. The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people. It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom.

The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can’t be intimidated… Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why — they’ve been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don’t give a damn. OK, you scream, we’ll go ahead and take over a big piece of Saudi or Iranian oil. And that’s the threat, you can’t intimidate them — it’s driving people in Washington berserk. But, you know, of all the major powers, they’ve been the least aggressive militarily.

Of course, everybody says they’re for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: what kind of peace?

There’s one white powder which is by far the most lethal known, it’s called sugar. If you look at the history of imperialism, a lot of it has to do with that. A lot of the imperial conquest, say in the Caribbean, set up a kind of a network… The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans, and it was done largely to pacify working people in England who were being driven into awful circumstances by the early industrial revolution. That’s why so many wars took place around the Caribbean.

Education: What should be taught?

Apr 112010
 

Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy. But though difficult, it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.

Friedrich Hayek Quotes

Apr 022010
 

Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program.

A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.

The task of the political philosopher can only be to influence public opinion, not to organize people for action. He will do so effectively only if he is not concerned with what is now politically possible but consistently defends the “general principles which are always the same.” In this sense I doubt whether there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments.

To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends.

Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.

Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it — or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs. I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called “mechanistic” explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position. Frequently the conclusions which rationalist presumption draws from new scientific insights do not at all follow from them. But only by actively taking part in the elaboration of the consequences of new discoveries do we learn whether or not they fit into our world picture and, if so, how. Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts.

That the conservative opposition to too much government control is not a matter of principle but is concerned with the particular aims of government is clearly shown in the economic sphere. Conservatives usually oppose collectivist and directivist measures in the industrial field, and here the liberals will often find allies in them. But at the same time conservatives are usually protectionists and have frequently supported socialist measures in agriculture. Indeed, though the restrictions which exist today in industry and commerce are mainly the result of socialist views, the equally important restrictions in agriculture were usually introduced by conservatives at an even earlier date.

What I have described as the liberal position shares with conservatism a distrust of reason to the extent that the liberal is very much aware that we do not know all the answers and that he is not sure that the answers he has are certainly the rights ones or even that we can find all the answers. He also does not disdain to seek assistance from whatever non-rational institutions or habits have proved their worth. The liberal differs from the conservative in his willingness to face this ignorance and to admit how little we know, without claiming the authority of supernatural forces of knowledge where his reason fails him. It has to be admitted that in some respects the liberal is fundamentally a skeptic — but it seems to require a certain degree of diffidence to let others seek their happiness in their own fashion and to adhere consistently to that tolerance which is an essential characteristic of liberalism.

When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike. There are many values of the conservative which appeal to me more than those of the socialists; yet for a liberal the importance he personally attaches to specific goals is no sufficient justification for forcing others to serve them.

I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false. The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.

Before we can try to remould society intelligently, we must understand its functioning; we must realise that, even when we believe that we understand it, we may be mistaken. What we must learn to understand is that human civilisation has a life of its own, that all our efforts to improve things must operate within a working whole which we cannot entirely control, and the operation of whose forces we can hope merely to facilitate and assist so far as we can understand them.

We can either have a free Parliament or a free people. Personal freedom requires that all authority is restrained by long-run principles which the opinion of the people approves.

It would clearly not be an improvement to build all houses exactly alike in order to create a perfect market for houses, and the same is true of most other fields where differences between the individual products prevent competition from ever being perfect.

Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.

However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as “the most anti-social and evil of all passions.

Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.

Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value. We are neither entitled to be unselfish at someone else’s expense nor is there any merit in being unselfish if we have no choice. The members of a society who in all respects are made to do the good thing have no title to praise.

We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.

What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative. While the last generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time, the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.

The day may not be far off when authority, by adding appropriate drugs to our water supply or by some other similar device, will be able to elate or depress, stimulate or paralyze, the minds of whole populations for its own purposes.

This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.

The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government. The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed.

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions…. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.

To rest the case for equal treatment of national or racial minorities on the assumption that they do not differ from other men is implicitly to admit that factual inequality would justify unequal treatment, and the proof that some differences do, in fact, exist would not be long in forthcoming. It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.

If one objects to the use of coercion in order to bring about a more even or more just distribution, this does not mean that one does not regard these as desirable. But if we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy.

It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living, that membership of a national group should entitle to a share in a cake altogether different from that in which members of other groups share.

No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.

The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.

That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects.

Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character. And some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves “liberals.” I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving.

It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regards as the public good.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they … have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most effective way to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning…. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed…. If one has not one’s self experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates… And the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people. Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, and words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.

The problems raised by a conscious direction of economic affairs on a national scale inevitably assume even greater dimensions when the same is attempted internationally. The conflict between planning and freedom cannot but become more serious as the similarity of standards and values among those submitted to a unitary plan diminishes.

Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.

The mind cannot foresee its own advance.

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, ‘a new form of servitude.’

The first need is to free ourselves of that worst form of contemporary obscurantism which tries to persuade us that what we have done in the recent past was all either wise or unavoidable. We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.

Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.

The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call ‘civilization’ rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

The case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depend. It is because every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.
Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen. These accidents occur in the combination of knowledge and attitudes, skills and habits, acquired by individual men and also when qualified men are confronted with the particular circumstances which they are equipped to deal with. Our necessary ignorance of so much means that we have to deal largely with probabilities and chances.
Of course, it is true of social as of individual life that favorable accidents usually do not just happen. We must prepare for them.

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources–if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.

Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation.

Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that “the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science.” “In science the more we know, the more extensive the contact with nescience.” Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom…The more men know, the smaller the share of all that knowledge becomes that any one mind can absorb. The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends.

Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances, but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad…Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.

The effect of the people’s agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

What we need and can hope to achieve is not more power in the hands of irresponsible international economic authorities but, on the contrary, a superior political power which can hold the economic interests in check, and in the conflict between them can truly hold the scales, because it is itself not mixed up in the economic game. The need is for an international political authority which, without power to direct the different people what they must do, must be able to restrain them from action which will damage others. The powers which must devolve on an international authority are not the new powers assumed by the states in recent times but that minimum of powers without which it is impossible to preserve peaceful relationships, i.e., essentially the powers of the ultra-liberal “laissez faire” state.

To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values is to assume responsibilities which commit one to the use of force; it is to assume a position where the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral. This is true even if we assume the dominant power to be as idealistic and unselfish as we can possibly conceive. But how small is the likelihood that it will be unselfish, and how great are the temptations!

While the method of the natural sciences is… analytic, the method of the social sciences is better described as compositive or synthetic. It is the so-called wholes, the groups of elements which are structurally connected, which we learn to single out from the totality of observed phenomena… Insofar as we analyze individual thought in the social sciences the purpose is not to explain that thought, but merely to distinguish the possible types of elements with which we shall have to reckon in the construction of different patterns of social relationships. It is a mistake… to believe that their aim is to explain conscious action … The problems which they try to answer arise only insofar as the conscious action of many men produce undesigned results… If social phenomena showed no order except insofar as they were consciously designed, there would indeed be no room for theoretical sciences of society and there would be, as is often argued, only problems of psychology. It is only insofar as some sort of order arises as a result of individual action but without being designed by any individual that a problem is raised which demands a theoretical explanation… people dominated by the scientistic prejudice are often inclined to deny the existence of any such order… it can be shown briefly and without any technical apparatus how the independent actions of individuals will produce an order which is no part of their intentions… The way in which footpaths are formed in a wild broken country is such an instance. At first everyone will seek for himself what seems to him the best path. But the fact that such a path has been used once is likely to make it easier to traverse and therefore more likely to be used again; and thus gradually more and more clearly defined tracks arise and come to be used to the exclusion of other possible ways. Human movements through the region come to conform to a definite pattern which, although the result of deliberate decision of many people, has yet not be consciously designed by anyone.

It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend. Historically this has been achieved by the influence of the various religious creeds and by traditions and superstitions which made men submit to those forces by an appeal to his emotions rather than to his reason. The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the powers of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them. This may well prove a hurdle which man will repeatedly reach, only to be thrown back into barbarism… Common acceptance of formal rules is indeed the only alternative to direction by a single will man has yet discovered.

Is it really likely that a National Planning Officer would have a better judgement of ‘the number of cars, the number of generators, and the quantities of frozen foods we are likely to require in, say, five years,’ than Ford or General Motors etc., and, even more important, would it even be desirable that various companies in an industry all act on the same guess?

To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be ‘fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it’ (Genesis 1:28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

To discover the meaning of what is called ‘social justice’ has been one of my chief preoccupations for more than 10 years. I have failed in this endeavour — or rather, have reached the conclusion that, with reference to society of free men, the phrase has no meaning whatever.

It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions. This is a belief deliberately maintained by the other side because if they admitted that the issue is not a scientific question, they would have to admit that their science is antiquated and that, in academic circles, it occupies the position of astrology and not one that has any justification for serious consideration in scientific discussion. It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

If the human intellect is allowed to impose a preconceived pattern on society, if our powers of reasoning are allowed to lay claim to a monopoly of creative effort… then we must not be surprised if society, as such, ceases to function as a creative force.

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.