The Fully Operational Police State
Ultimately, opponents of the impending police state have one thing going for them: it will not work. A telling detail of Orwell's 1984 is the dreary destitution of the society it depicts. Command and control apparatuses are unproductive and cost a lot of money. On a deeper level, threats, blackmail, and rule by brute force are incompatible with human nature, productive endeavor, or progress. If people are supposedly unfit for freedom―the ability to run their own lives―then they are even more unfit to coercively run other people’s lives. Try as statists might to obscure it, two diverging trends clearly emerge from even a cursory study of human history: mankind only thrives and grows under conditions approaching freedom, and every social unit based on force fails.
There will always be those craven, pathetic excuses for human beings who will take their daily ration of gruel and accept what the government does without question or challenge. But it is free, independent minds who discover, invent, imagine, invest, take risks, build mankind’s store of knowledge, and pull it forward. Every miserable dictator and would be dictator since human society began has eventually discovered that free minds do not think under threat of a club, spear, sword, gun, thermonuclear device, concentration camp, or gas chamber; thought and freedom are inseparable. When they try to kill freedom, and consequently the mind, they sign their own death warrant.
There will always be those craven, pathetic excuses for human beings who will take their daily ration of gruel and accept what the government does without question or challenge. But it is free, independent minds who discover, invent, imagine, invest, take risks, build mankind’s store of knowledge, and pull it forward. Every miserable dictator and would be dictator since human society began has eventually discovered that free minds do not think under threat of a club, spear, sword, gun, thermonuclear device, concentration camp, or gas chamber; thought and freedom are inseparable. When they try to kill freedom, and consequently the mind, they sign their own death warrant.
LS I totally agree with you and point for you. They have to try to take us to the Anthem mentality, and as is pointed out in the blog, someone will think but most will not. Call me Liberty 5-3000.
The irony (to me) is that we are being marketed to want the very devices that seal our doom...everything from the newest 'smart' phone, to the voice command control center in our car dash. No one has to 'implant' anything to monitor us...we willing fork over month's of our wages for that privilege. We could be the dumbest protectors of our own personal freedom that ever walked the planet.
We fight in line to put on the chains...as witnessed every time Apple has a new device up for sale. Lemmings are retarded, compared to us.
Read the whole blog in the original link. The closing paragraph which was quoted, is a dying man's death rattle.
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/77...)
I have to agree with Lionel Hutz that they do not care about the ultimate cost. We also have a discussion about whether and to what extent "we are Rome." I do not endorse that easy claim, but I do note - as with China, the Islamic Golden Age, and other similarities - that the institution of state becomes uncontrolled, a juggernaut. I recently watched "The Lives of Others" (Die Leben der Andern) a fictionalized (and romantized) story about an East German Stasi officer. It is important to understand that superstate operatives do not care about the cost. In fact - if you know Jane Jacobs's "two systems of survival" - cost per se is absolutely of no concern to them.
I think that there is a 'point of no return' that has to be either ignored...or overlooked.