DECENTRALIZATION AND SELF GOVERNMENT
The Anarchists propose that the state should be abolished; and in so far as it serves as the instrument by means of which the ruling class preserves its privileges; in so far as it is a device for enabling paranoiacs to satisfy their lust for power and carry out their crazy dreams of glory, the state is obviously worthy of abolition.
THE IDEA OF CREATING a list of twelve vital dates in history came to me at Manila as I was preparing to set sail across the Pacific to America. It came at an appropriate moment, for it found me struggling with the problem of dates in working on the first volume of The Story of Civilization.
Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties?
We have defined civilization as “social order promoting cultural creation.” 07It is political order
secured through custom, morals, and law, and economic order secured through a continuity of
production and exchange; it is cultural creation through freedom and facilities for the origination,
expression, testing, and fruition of ideas, letters, manners, and arts. It is an intricate and
precarious web of human relationships, laboriously built and readily destroyed.
WHAT IS THOUGHT? It baffles description because it includes everything through which it might
be defined.
The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. Whereas in early
agricultural societies human violence caused up to 15 per cent of all human deaths, and in the
twentieth century it caused 5 percent, today it is responsible for only 1 percent.
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. Without them we should live spasmodically and intermittently.
It is fashionable nowadays to say that Malthus was wrong, because he did not foresee
that improved methods of transportation can now guarantee that food surpluses
produced in one area shall be quickly and cheaply transferred to another, where there is
a shortage.
Goering and Hitler displayed an almost maudlin concern for the welfare of animals; Stalin’s favorite work of art was a celluloid musical about Old Vienna, called The Great Waltz.
Between 1800 and 1900 the doctrine of Pie in the Sky gave place, in a majority of Western minds, to the doctrine of Pie on the Earth.