Category: Thought

So what do you do if you don’t know? How do you manage your risk if you don’t know? . . . The thing that you can default to is freedom. Because the one thing we know is that if we were to lose our freedom to anything, screw it: we’re out of here. Right? We’d all just close the planet and starve to death. If we lose our freedom we don’t even want to be here.

If you say to me ‘I can give you your freedom back but there’s a one percent change that you’ll die,’ I’m in; I’ll take my freedom. ‘I’ll give you your freedom back but there’s a one percent change your grandmother might die a few years early,’ I’m in; ‘sorry, Grandma.’ I’m gonna talk to Grandma, first, but you know what? She agrees. Grandma doesn’t disagree. Grandma wants me to be free; Grandma wants to be free. . . .

If you don’t know what’s the right thing to do, you have to default to the primary human needs. And we have a primary human need for freedom.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams, Periscope Episode 1151, “Trump Slaughtermeter Pinned 100%. Swiss Coronavirus Mystery. Who Reversal.”

When a man is treated like a beast, he says, ‘After all, I’m human.’ When he behaves like a beast, he says ‘After all, I’m only human.’

Karl Kraus, as quoted in Thomas Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors (1977).

Leftist regimes turn to political terror as their policies fail. When the idealism dies, and the theories fall apart, the organizers pursue misery for the sake of misery, using fear, deprivation, and hate to maintain their grip on power while crushing the political threats to their rule.

Daniel Greenfield, “The Chinese Lockdown-and-Mask Model Failed. Now Its Proponents Need Scapegoats,” Sultan Knish, October 17, 2020.

“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

“There is only one boss: The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

[T]o say that a bad government must be established for fear of anarchy is really saying that we should kill ourselves for fear of dying.

Richard Henry Lee (January 20, 1732 – June 19, 1794), letter to Edmund Jennings Randolph (August 10, 1753 – September 12, 1813), Governor of Virginia, October 16, 1787.

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It’s a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (1977), p. 330.

I have done nothing more than show that there is a distinction between an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction above all that provides culture with elbow room. The others, those who fail to make this distinction, are divided into those who use the urn as chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as urn.

Karl Kraus, as quoted in Thomas Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors (1977).

For, in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery: but in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt.

Jonathan Swift, The Drapier’s Letters, letter iv (October 13, 1724).

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Scientific method consists in applying to those subjects which lie without the range of our immediate experience those same common-sense methods of reasoning which successful men of the world apply in judging of matters which concern their own interests.

Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy, 1886, chapter III, “Of Scientific Method”