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In reply to the discussion: Walmart Pre-Crime Treats All Customers Like Criminals [View all]DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)5. de Tocqueville and Orwell both foresaw this:
''Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.''
''When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.''
~Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America - Volume 2
''When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.''
~Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America - Volume 2
''For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition kills its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant; in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory along to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him.''
''We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that? When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.''
~George Orwell, 1984
''We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that? When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.''
~George Orwell, 1984
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Call Workers "Employees" or "Workers" if you're trying to make a point.
tea and oranges
May 2014
#24