If you value your position and privileges more than truth, you will say what people want to hear rather than what needs to be said. —Lew Rockwell
Tag: Conformity
They censored us, banned us, and flagged every single post. They claimed it was “safe and effective,” but we were right about it not working or being safe the entire damn time. —Mindy Robinson
We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble: “But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.” We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence.
When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
At what exact point, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one’s home?
How we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If … if … We didn’t love freedom enough. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good, just because it’s accepted by a majority. —Booker T. Washington
I’m a libertarian. I think a lot of people are libertarians and are afraid to admit it. —Kurt Russell
The practical problem is we have, historically, been so beaten down by the state, from kings and emperors, presidents and bureaucrats, that we now accept the lash of compulsion, so long as we can preserve the illusion that the whip was constructed with our consultation. Our debate is cordoned off into a small rhetorical space, where we discuss who is allowed to wield the whip this year or next year. We line up to vote for someone who will whip us less, and our adversaries more, but we never question the whip itself. —Robert Weir (WhyNotLibertarianism.com)
The practical problem is we have, historically, been so beaten down by the state, from kings and emperors, presidents and bureaucrats, that we now accept the lash of compulsion, so long as we can preserve the illusion that the whip was constructed with our consultation. Our debate is cordoned off into a small rhetorical space, where we discuss who is allowed to wield the whip this year or next year. We line up to vote for someone who will whip us less, and our adversaries more, but we never question the whip itself. —Robert Weir (WhyNotLibertarianism.com)
It is amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. —Thomas Sowell
My rights will not be subject to your emergency. —Jordan Peterson
Government-provided free tuition tends more and more to produce a uniform conformist education, with college faculties ultimately dependent for their jobs on the government, and so developing an economic interest in the profession and teaching a statist, pro-government, and socialist ideology. —Henry Hazlitt