- ‘Do you not know that a multitude of your brethren die or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate for yourself anything from common subsistence that exceeded your own?’ Rousseau (103)
- ‘The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects. For alone maintained them, force alone overthrows him.’ Anatole France
- ‘It is from the nature of man that the principles of natural right and the foundations of social existence must be deduced.’ (103)
- ‘No person of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that often occurs when long-subdued masses rise against their oppressors, or take their first steps towards liberty and social reconstruction.’ (106)
- ‘Language, in its essential properties and the manner of its use provides the basic criterion for determining that another organism is a being with a human mind and the human capacity for free thought and self-expression, and with the essential human need for freedom from the external constraints of repressive authority.’ (106)
- ‘We might reinterpret this idea in more current terms by speculating that rather sudden and dramatic mutations might have led to qualities of intelligence that are, so far as we know, unique to man, possession of language in the human sense being the most distinctive index of these qualities. If this is correct, as at least a first approximation to the facts, the study of language might be expected to offer an entering wedge, or perhaps a model, for an investigation of human nature that would provide the grounding for a much broader theory of human nature.’ (108)
- ‘Education, then, must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment.’ (110)
- ‘Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being.’ (110)
- ‘It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him.’ Simon Linguet (111-112)
- ‘If there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage, then a new emancipation must be awaited, Fourier’s ‘third and last emancipatory phase of history,’ which will transform the proletariat to free men by eliminating the commodity character of labor, ending wage slavery, and bringing the commercial, industrial, and financial institutions under democratic control.’ (112)
- ‘We can perhaps look forward to a day when these various strands will be brought together within the framework of libertarian socialism, a social form that barely exists today though its elements can be perceived: in the guarantee of individual rights that has achieved its highest form – though still tragically flawed – in the Western democracies.’ (113)
- ‘Social action must be animated by a vision of a future society.’ (113)
- ‘These judgments must derive from some concept of the nature of man, and one may seek empirical foundations by investigating man’s nature as it is revealed by his behavior and his creations, material, intellectual, and social.’ (113-114)
- ‘Modern science and technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it.’ (114)
- ‘Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development…It seems to me that we must break away, sharply and radically, from much of modern social and behavioral science if we are to move towards a deeper understanding of these matters.’ (114)
- ‘For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account.’ Rudolf Rocker (118)
- ‘As a socialist, Rocker would take for granted ‘that the serious, final, complete liberation, of the workers is possible only upon one condition: that of the appropriation of capital, that is, of raw material and all the tools of labor, including land, by the whole body of the workers.’ Bakunin ’ (119)
- ‘The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state…But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletarian can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.’ Engels (120)
- ‘In contrast – the anarchists – most eloquently Bakunin – warned of the dangers of the ‘red bureaucracy,’ which would prove to be ‘the most vile and terrible lie that our century has created.’ ’ (121)
- ‘In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the means of production, the anarchist takes his stand with those who struggle to bring about ‘the third and last emancipatory phase of history,’ the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of free and voluntary associations of producers.’ Fourier (124)
- ‘The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge.’ Marx (125)
- ‘From the ‘broad back’ of anarchism [Daniel Guérin] has selected for more intensive scrutiny those ideas and actions that can be described as libertarian socialist. This is natural and proper. This framework accommodates the major anarchist spokesmen as well as the mass actions that have been animated by anarchist sentiments and ideals. Guérin is concerned not only with anarchist thought but also with the spontaneous actions of popular forces that actually create new social forms in the course of revolutionary struggle. He is concerned with social as well as intellectual creativity. Furthermore, he attempts to draw from the constructive achievements of the past lessons that will enrich the theory of social liberation. For those who wish not only to understand the world, but also to change it, this is the proper way to study the history of anarchism.’ (128-129)
- ‘[Bakunin] had in mind a highly organized form of society, but a society that was organized on the basis of organic units, organic communities. And generally they meant by that the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization, which might be national or even international in scope. And the decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return and in which, in fact, they live.’ (133)
- ‘Representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain, would be criticized by an anarchist of this school on two grounds. First of all because there is a monopoly of power centralized in the State, and secondly – and critically – because representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere. Anarchists of this tradition have always held that democratic control of one’s productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice.’ (133-134)
- ‘A good example of a really large-scale anarchist revolution – in fact the best example to my knowledge – is the Spanish revolution in 1936, in which over most of Republican Spain there was a quite inspiring anarchist revolution that involved both industry and agriculture over substantial areas, developed in a way which to the outside looks spontaneous. Though in fact if you look at the roots of it, you discover that it was based on some three generations of experiment and thought and work which extended anarchist ideas to very large parts of the population in this largely pre-industrial – though not totally pre-industrial – society. And that again was, by both human measures and indeed anyone’s economic measures, quite successful. That is, production continued effectively; workers in farms and factories proved quite capable of managing their affairs without coercion from above, contrary to what lots of socialists, communists, liberals and others wanted to believe, and in fact you can’t tell what would have happened. That anarchist revolution was simply destroyed by force.’ (134-135)
- ‘If one reads, say, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s critique of the State of 1792, a significant classic libertarian text that certainly inspired Mill, one finds that he doesn’t speak at all of the need to resist private concentration of power: rather he speaks of the need to resist the encroachment of coercive State power. And that is what one finds also in the early American tradition. But the reason is that that was the only kind of power there was. I mean, Humboldt takes for granted that individuals are roughly equivalent in their private power, and that the only real imbalance of power lies in the centralized authoritarian state, and individual freedom must be sustained against its intrusion – the State or the Church. That what he feels one must resist.’ (135)
- ‘I would think that executing decisions taken by representative bodies is a part-time job which should be rotated throughout the community and, furthermore, should be undertaken by people who at all times continue to be participants in their own direct activity.’ (138)
- ‘Orwell essentially had captured the nature of the modern state. And that’s exactly the case. I mean the Pentagon is in no sense a defense department. It has never defended the United States
- ‘There’s a certain amount of work that just has to be done if we’re to maintain that standard of living. It’s an open question how onerous that work has to be. Let’s recall that science and technology and intellect have not been devoted to examining that question or to overcoming the onerous and self-destructive character of the necessary work of society. The reason is that it has always been assumed that there is a substantial body of wage-slaves who will do it simply because otherwise they’ll starve. However, if human intelligence is turned to the question of how to make the necessary work of society itself meaningful, we don’t know what the answer will be.’ (141)
- ‘I think the answer is, much less than it is today’ but let’s assume there is some extent to which it remains onerous. Well, in that case, the answer’s quite simple: that work has to be equally shared among people capable of doing it.’ (142)
- ‘One alternative is to have it equally shared, the other is to design social institutions so that some group of people will be simply compelled to do the work, on pain of starvation. Those are the two alternatives.’ (143)
- ‘It will contribute to a spiritual transformation – precisely that kind of great transformation in the way humans conceive of themselves and their ability to act, to decide, to create, to produce, to enquire.’ (147)
- ‘The anarchosyndicalist thinker Rudolf Rocker described modern anarchism as ‘the confluence of the two great currents, which during and since the French revolution have found such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe : Socialism and Liberalism.’ ’ (149)
- ‘All necessarily subordinate themselves and their interests to the overriding need to serve the interests of the owners and managers of the society, who, furthermore, with their control over resources, are easily able to shape the ideological system (the media, schools, universities and so on) in their interests, to determine the basic conditions within which the political process will function, its parameters and basic agenda, and to call upon the resources of state violence, when need be, to suppress any challenge to entrenched power.’ (149)
- ‘In operative reality, freedom in a capitalist society, like everything else, becomes a kind of commodity.’ (150)
- ‘The world’s two great propaganda systems are united in the doctrine that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors, and others that draw from that experience, are ‘socialist.’ ’ (150)
- ‘Bakunin’s insights were developed in the context of a perceptive critique of the intelligentsia of the modern era, a ‘new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars,’ who will seek to create ‘the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and elitist of all regimes.’ They will seek to assume the reins of state power, he warned, exploiting popular struggles for their own ends, and in the name of ‘science’ and their alleged superior understanding will drive the ‘ignorant masses’ to a form of ‘socialism’ that will ‘serve to conceal the domination of the masses by a handful of privileged elite.’ And where popular struggle fails, they will become the managers of the increasingly centralized state capitalist systems – the managers of the corporate economy, of state power, of the ideological institutions – while ‘the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled ‘the people’s stick.’ ’ ’ (150-151)
- ‘Structures of hierarchy and domination are fundamentally illegitimate. They can be defended only on grounds of contingent need, an argument that rarely stands up to analysis.’ (156)
- ‘Russell traced the habit of submission in part to coercive educational practices. His views are reminiscent of the 17th and 18th century thinks who held that the mind is not to be filled with knowledge ‘from without, like a vessel,’ but ‘to be kindled and awaked.’ ’ (156)
- ‘Fame, fortune, and respect await those who reveal the crimes of official enemies; those who undertake the vastly more important task of raising a mirror to ourselves can expect quite different treatment, in any society.’ (156)
- ‘The Reagan phenomenon offered a new way to achieve this fundamental goal of capitalist democracy. The United States
- ‘John Locke wrote that ‘day-laborers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairymaids’ must be told what to believe; “The greatest part cannot know and therefore they must believe.’ ’ (159)
- ‘As far back as Herodotus we can read how people who had struggled to gain their freedom ‘became once more subject to autocratic government’ through the acts of able and ambitious leaders who ‘introduced for the first time the ceremonial of royalty,’ creating a legend that the leader ‘was a being of a different order from mere men’ who must be shrouded in mystery, and leaving the secrets of government, which are not the affair of the vulgar, to those entitled to manage them.’ (160)
- ‘[Intellectuals’] task is to keep the giddy multitude in a state of implicit submission, and thus to bar the dread prospect of freedom and self-determination.’ (160)
- ‘An orthodox Marxist, Lenin did not regard socialism as a viable option in this backward and underdeveloped country; until his last days, it remained for him an ‘elementary truth of Marxism, that the victory of socialism requires the joint efforts of workers in a number of advanced countries,’ notably Germany
- ‘Internal government planning documents, and even the public record, reveal that a driving concern of US planners has been the fear that the ‘virus’ of democracy and social reform might spread, ‘infecting’ regions beyond. Examples include the first major postwar counterinsurgency operation in Greece in the late 1940s, the undermining of the labor movement in Europe at the same time, the US invasion of South Vietnam, the overthrow of the democratic governments of Guatemala and Chile, the attack against Nicaragua and the popular movements elsewhere in Central America, and many other examples. Similar fears were expressed by European statesmen with regard to the American revolution.’ (163)
- ‘These ideas bring us to the Reagan administration, which established a state propaganda agency that was by far the most extensive in American history, much to the delight of the advocates of a powerful and interventionist state who are called ‘conservatives’ in one of the current Orwellian perversions of political discourse.’ (164)
- ‘Until World War I, there was only a slender basis for freedom of speech in the United States, and it was not until 1964 that the law of seditious libel was struck down by the Supreme Court. In 1969, the court finally protected speech apart from ‘incitement to imminent lawless action’…The 1969 Supreme Court decision formulated a libertarian standard which, I believe, is unique in the world. In Canada Europe , the situation is still more primitive. England
- ‘These ideas, regarded as a progressive ‘political philosophy for liberal democracy,’ have an unmistakable resemblance to the Leninist idea of a vanguard party that leads the stupid masses to a better life that they cannot conceive or construct on their own.’ (169)
- ‘Churchill’s conception was that ‘the government of the world’ should be in the hands of ‘rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations,’ who had ‘no reason to seek for anything more’ and thus would keep the peace, excluding those who were ‘hungry’ and ambitious.’ ’ (170)
- ‘With conservative elites discredited by their association with fascism and radical democratic ideas in the air, it was necessary to pursue a worldwide program to crush the anti-fascist resistance and its popular base and to restore the traditional order, to ensure that politics would not be let loose among those peoples; this campaign, conducted from Korea to western Europe, would be the topic of the first chapter of any serious work on post-World War II history.’ (170)
- ‘A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. They can then be permitted, even encouraged, to ratify the decisions made by their betters in periodic elections. The ‘rascal multitude’ are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.’ (171)
- ‘I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.’ (178)
- ‘The core part of anyone’s point of view is some concept of human nature, however it may be remote from awareness or lack articulation. At least, that is true of people who consider themselves moral agents, not monsters. Monsters aside, whether a person who advocates reform or revolution, or stability or return to earlier stages, or simply cultivating one’s own garden, takes stand on the grounds that it is ‘good for people.’ But that judgment is based on some conception of human nature, which is a reasonable person will try to make as clear as possible, if only so that it can be evaluated.’ (185)
- ‘is my granddaughter no different from a rock, a salamander, a chicken, a monkey? A person who dismisses this absurdity as absurd recognizes that there is a distinctive human nature.’ (185)
- ‘Grotesque as the Soviet empire was, its very existence offered a certain space for non-alignment, and for perfectly cynical reasons, it sometimes provided assistance to victims of Western attack. Those options are gone, and the South is suffering the consequences.’ (187)
- ‘With much of Eastern Europe returning to the fold, owners and managers have powerful new weapons against the working-classes and the poor at home. GM and VW can not only transfer production to Mexico Brazil Poland Hungary
- ‘It should be added that the extraordinary power that corporations and financial institutions enjoy was not the result of popular choices. It was crafted by courts and lawyers in the course of the construction of a developmental state that serves the interests of private power.’ (192)
- ‘Conventional practice is to restrict such terms as ‘totalitarian’ and ‘dictatorship’ to political power. Brady is unusual in not keeping to this convention, a natural one, which helps us to remove centers of decision-making from the public eye. The effort to do so is expected in any society based on illegitimate authority – any actual society, that is. That is why, for example, accounts in terms of personal characteristics and failings, vague and unspecific cultural practices, and the like, are much preferred to the study of the structure and function of powerful institutions.’ (192)
- ‘The anarchist vision, in almost every variety, has looked forward to the dismantling of state power. Personally, I share that vision, though it runs directly counter to my goals. Hence the tension to which I referred. My short-term goals are to defend and even strengthen elements of state authority which, though illegitimate in fundamental ways, are critically necessary right now to impede the dedicated efforts to ‘roll back’ the progress that has been achieved in extending democracy and human rights.’ (192-193)
- ‘State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because it offers (weak) protection to some aspects of that vision. Governments have a fatal flaw: unlike the private tyrannies, the institutions of state power and authority offer to the despised public an opportunity to play some role, however limited, in managing their own affairs. That defect is intolerable to the masters, who now feel, with some justification, that changes in the international economic and political order offer the prospects of creating a kind of ‘utopia for the masters,’ with dismal prospects for most of the rest.’ (193)
- ‘The goals of a committed anarchist should be to defend some state institutions from the attack against them, while trying at the same time to pry them open to more meaningful public participation – and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society, if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.’ (194)
- ‘It is a remarkable to trace the evolution of values from a pre-capitalist figure like Smith, with his stress on sympathy, the goal of liberty with equality, and the basic human right to creative and fulfilling work, to those who celebrate ‘the New Spirit of the Age,’ often shamelessly invoking Smith’s name.’ (196)
- ‘One intriguing illustration of the state of the intellectual culture and its prevailing values is the commentary of the difficult problems we face in uplifting the people of Eastern Europe, now at last liberated, so that we can extend to them the loving care we have lavished on our wards elsewhere for several hundred years. The consequences seem rather clear in an impressive array of horror chambers around the world, but miraculously – and most fortunately – they teach no lessons about the values of out civilization and the principles that guide its noble leaders; only ‘anti-Americans’ and their ilk could be so demented as to suggest that the consistent record of history might merit a side glance.’ (196-197)
- ‘No longer was Cuba an agent of the Kremlin, bent on taking over Latin America and conquering the United States, trembling in terror. The lies of 30 years can be quietly shelved: terror and economic warfare have always been an attempt to bring democracy, in the revised standard version. Therefore we must tighten the embargo that ‘has contributed to an increase in hunger, illness, death and to one of the world’s largest neurological epidemics in the past century,’ according to health experts writing in US
- ‘The same elementary rationality dictates that to evaluate the Soviet command economy as compared with the capitalist alternative, we must compare Easter European countries to others that were like them when the ‘experiment’ with the two development models began. Obviously not the West; one has to go back half a millennium to find Russia and Brazil, or Bulgaria and Guatemala, though that would be unfair to the Communist model, which never had anything remotely like the advantages of the US satellites. If we undertake the rational comparison, we conclude, indeed, that the Communist economic model was a disaster; and the Western one an even more catastrophic failure. There are nuances and complexities, but the basic conclusions are rather solid.’ (201)
- ‘The voice of working people was clearly and vividly articulated in the labor and community press that flourished from the mid-19th century until World War II, and even beyond, finally destroyed by state and private power. As recently as the 1950s, 800 labor newspapers were still reaching 20-30 million people.’ (202)
- ‘Smith recognized that ‘The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments.’ Hence: ‘the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding…and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be…But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes pains to prevent it.’ ’ (204)
- ‘There is, I think, an eerie similarity between the present period and the days when contemporary ideology – what is now called ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘economic rationalism’ – what was being fashioned by Ricardo, Malthus, and others. Their task was to demonstrate to people that they have no rights, contrary to what they foolishly believe. Indeed, that is proven by ‘science.’ The grave intellectual error of pre-capitalist culture was the belief that people have a place in the society and a right to it, perhaps a rotten place, but at least something. The new science demonstrated that the concept of a ‘right to live’ was a simple fallacy. It had to be patiently explained to misguided people that they have no rights, other than the right to try their luck in the market. A person lacking independent wealth who cannot survive in the labor market ‘has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is,’ Malthus proclaimed in influential work. It is a ‘great evil’ and violation of ‘natural liberty’ to mislead the poor into believing that they have further rights, Ricardo held.’ (206)
- ‘Any attempt to help the poor only harms them – the poor, that is; the rich are miraculously helped thereby, as when state power intervenes to bail out investors after the collapse of the highly-touted Mexican ‘economic miracle,’ or to save failing banks and industries, or to bar Japan from American markets to allow domestic corporations to reconstruct the steel, automotive, and electronics industry in the 1980s (amidst impressive rhetoric about free markets by the most protectionist administration in the postwar era and its acolytes).’ (207)
- ‘The libertarian movements have been very shortsighted in pursuing doctrine in a rigid fashion without being concerned about the human consequences.’ (212)
- ‘They try to decode it and see what is the actual meaning behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old child. There’s nothing there. But these are the ways in which contemporary intellectuals, including those on the Left, create great careers for themselves, power for themselves, marginalize people, intimidate people and so on. In the United States, for example, and indeed much of the Third World, lots of young radical activists are simply intimidated by the incomprehensible gibberish that comes out of left-wing intellectual movements – often radical feminists, or this or that – which is just impossible to understand. It makes people feel they’re not going to do anything because, unless I somehow understand the latest version of post-modern this and that, I can’t go out in the streets and organize people.’ (216-217)
- ‘Try asking somebody to explain to you the latest essay of Derrida or somebody in terms that you can understand. They can’t do it. At least they can’t do it to me: I don’t understand. And I think you must ask yourself very carefully what great leap in evolution has taken place that enables people to have these fantastic insights that they can’t convey to ordinary people about topics that no one understands very much about. One should be skeptical about that, that’s another technique by which intellectuals dominate people in my opinion.’ (217)
- ‘When you teach you don’t stand there and make statements that people are supposed to copy down. You work with people. That’s true whether you’re teaching six-year old children or post-graduate school. You’re working together, trying to enlighten yourselves. Often the person that’s teaching learns more than the student. So you’re using whatever knowledge and resources and privilege you have to help other people and to learn from them and so on. That’s what respectable intellectual work it. It doesn’t mean there is any vanguard; in fact, the intellectual is a servant working together with other people to try and gain better understanding. There is really nothing more to say about this. I mean, in fact, it’s kind of remarkable that the place where it is completely understood is in the hard sciences. If you go to topics that really have a lot of substantive content – like, say, higher mathematics or advanced physics or even our graduate courses in linguistics – This is exactly what they are. It’s not a matter of a professor standing there and people taking notes, people would laugh at that. It’s an interchange. You talk about the work you are doing, some of the students get up and say that’s wrong, it’s a different way, you should think about that. Then you work again at the problem. It’s no different when you are talking to working class people in slums and they are trying to figure out what their problems are. I mean, you have certain knowledge, they have certain knowledge, you have experience, they have experience. Try to put them together and see if it can be used constructively.’ (218)
- ‘There are business sections, have you ever seen a labor section? I don’t know a single newspaper that has a labor section. Every single one has a business section. There’s a business press, is there a labor press? If you look here, I don’t know, but in the United Stats, try to find a reporter assigned to the labor movement.’ (219)
- ‘You have to talk about these things, so people can understand them. They’re not very hard, you don’t have to talk about them in post-modern rhetoric. You can talk about them in very simple words because they’re very simple points and people easily understand. The only people who don’t understand them are intellectuals. But of course, they have a vested interest in not understanding them. If they understand them, then their own powers are lost. So they’re not going to understand them, they’re going to cloud them in mysteries.’ (220)
- ‘We should be cautious in trying to sketch out the nature of the future society in too much detail. It’s not that it can’t be done. It can be done in interesting and different ways – and it has been done – but I think the real question is to what extent is it important to do it and to what extent is it important to just try and experiment and chip away at existing structures?’ (222)
- ‘We should be cautious in trying to sketch out the nature of the future society in too much detail. It’s not that it can’t be done. It can be done in interesting and different ways – and it has been done – but I think the real question is to what extent is it important to do it and to what extent is it important to just try and experiment and chip away at existing structures?’ (222)
- ‘Normal human emotions are sympathy and solidarity, not just for people but for stranded dolphins. It’s just a normal reaction for people. If you go back to the classic political economists, people like Adam Smith, this was just taken for granted as the core of human nature and society. One of the main concentrations of advertising and education is to drive that out of your mind. And it’s very conscious. In fact, it’s conscious in social policy right in front of our eyes today. Take the effort to destroy Social Security. Well, what’s the point of that? There’s a lot of scam about financial problems, which is all total nonsense. And, of course, they want Wall Street to make a killing. Underlying it all is something much deeper. Social Security is based on a human emotion and it’s a natural human emotion which ahs to be driven out of people’s minds, namely the emotion that you care about other people.’ (223)
- ‘…
No comments:
Post a Comment