A Quote by Anthony de Jasay
Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure.
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We lived in a totalitarian system for more than 70 years, and our views are still under its influence. Many heads of state in the former Soviet republics believe that they must have total power.
My belief is that when the military is used as the sole instrument of power, that never has a good outcome. If there's no one to take ownership and develop that failed state, human suffering can be even worse than that created by the conflict itself.
There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.
[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.
The competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly.
Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state - the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.
Putin set out to build a mafia state. He didn't set out to build a totalitarian regime. But he was building his mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime. And so we end up with a mafia state and a totalitarian society.
Puzzlement and doubt are, however, already crimes in the totalitarian state. The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorize, to salivate when the bell rings.
Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.
A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.
If an agency is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, then it is also judge in all conflicts involving itself. Consequently, instead of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision making will also cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. That is, if one can only appeal to the state for justice, justice will be perverted in the favor of the state, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding.
The moment that the state came into conflict with the higher power, the moment that it set itself up as an end in itself, it became identified with Augustine's earthly city and lost all claims to a higher sanction than the law of force and self-interest. Without justice, what is a great kingdom but a great robbery, magnum latrocinium?
Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.
The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.
My doctrine means that I must identify myself with life, with everything that lives, that I must share the majesty of life in the presence of God. The sum-total of this life is God. .. Man is not at peace with himself until he has become like unto God. The endeavor to reach this state is the supreme, the only ambition worth having. And this is self-realisation. This self-realisation is the subject of the Gita, as it is of all scriptures... to be a real devotee is to realise oneself. Self-realisation is not something apart.
My sole focus as far back as I can remember was all about my dream to become a singer.
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