If you’re teaching, say, physics, there’s no point in persuading a student that you’re right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you’re wrong.
Well, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, “wage slavery” is intolerable. And I don’t think people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically, by their participants, by the communities in which they exist, and so on; and I think basically through various kinds of free association.
Now, the popular perception certainly is that violence is greater today-but that’s mostly propaganda: that’s just a part of the whole effort to make people frightened, so that they’ll abandon their rights.
Rather, democracy is when every free citizen has authority and oligarchy is when the rich have it. Democracy is when there is a majority of free, poor men who have authority to rule, while oligarchy is when it is in the hands of the wealthy and well-born, who are a minority.
So we know that human nature, and that includes our nature, yours and mine, can very easily turn people into quite efficient torturers and mass-murderers and slave-drivers... To the extent that the statement is true, and there is such an extent, it’s just not relevant: human nature also has the capacity to lead to selflessness, and cooperation, and sacrifice, and support, and solidarity, and tremendous courage, and lots of other things too.
Just war theory has been converted into a form of apologetics for whatever atrocities your favored state is carrying out.
The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state are punished.
Willingness to be puzzled is a valuable trait to cultivate, from childhood to advanced inquiry.
One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40 percent of the US population does not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.
I mean, you can pretend up to a certain point that the world has infinite resources and that it’s an infinite wastebasket-but at some point you’re going to run into the reality, which is that that isn’t true.
I think that’s a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.
The Republicans have moved so far toward a dedication to the wealthy and the corporate sector that they can-not hope to get votes on their actual programs, and have turned to mobilizing sectors of the population that have always been there, but not as an organized coalitional political force: evangelicals, nativists, racists, and the victims of the forms of globalization designed to set working people around the world in competition with one another while protecting the privileged.
Come at me bro!
There may be no end to such discoveries, if civilization survives. A truly decent and honest person will always seek to discover forms of oppression, hierarchy, domination, and authority that infringe fundamental human rights. As some are overcome, others will be revealed that previously were not part of our conscious awareness. We thus come to a better understanding of who and what we are in our inner nature, and who and what we should be in our actual lives. This.
Settler colonialism, which is what this is, is by far the worst kind of imperialism, because it gets rid of the native population. Other kinds of imperialism exploit them, but settler colonialism eliminates them, “exterminates” them, to use the words of the Founding Fathers.
War is a racket. The few profit, the many pay.
You aren’t supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding. That’s a very dangerous idea, and therefore it’s been wiped out of history.
Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don’t have to pay taxes at all... The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous.
If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get in trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated.
If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to sell themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, “they rent themselves freely, it’s a free contract” – but that’s a joke. If your choice is, “do what I tell you or starve”, that’s not a choice – it’s infact what was commonly referred to as ‘wage slavery’ in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.