I want Conservatives to meditate on this (because they won't find it entirely foreign, and yet it leads further than their thought usually does):
An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia to-day.
Variant translation: In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality...
Do our modern Liberals find those ideas antithetical to their own? They shouldn't. Here's what I'd like them to consider:
The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
Perhaps The Left prefers this:
This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that does by the name of patriotism—how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.
I am partial to a spirit of humble reverence in the face of the yet-unknown. Einstein's aphorisms to that effect are wonderful, for the purpose of meditation, but his faith in existing and previously existing theories (particularly unproven ones) of economic and political organization of collective action, strike me as naive at best. The man didn't know how to comb his hair or tie his shoes! Was he the man we'd trust to direct our economy?
The economy isn't an abstraction - it's about the guys living under a bridge; guys like me, living in old houses that need work; rich people in Condos and Mansions - what we eat, drink and entertain ourselves with, inside and outside our homes.
Einstein provided many, many insights in to Life worthy of his genius, but it was extraordinarily inconsistent with his genius, and many of his aphorisms, to promote Statism: the "Only Our Way" solution to social problems.
The Libertarian Way allows experiments like those of Robert Owen, the Phalansteries and the Amana Colonies without fear. We will adopt your socialist ways if they prove to be more effective than our own.
Thus far the evidence for Socialism over Freedom isn't all that strong, but, hey! We're willing to allow you all to keep experimenting.
As long as your vic... I mean subjects... er, participants are volunteers.
100% pure volunteers.
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