The capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files, containing even the most personal details about health and personal behaviour of every citizen in addition to the more customary data.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information. Our existing institutions will be supplanted by pre-crisis management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance likely social crises and to develop programs to cope with them.
This will encourage tendencies through the next several decades toward a technetronic era, a dictatorship, leaving even less room for political procedures as we know them. Finally, looking ahead to the end of the century, the possibility of biochemical mind control and genetic tinkering with man, including beings which will function like men and reason with them as well, could give rise to some difficult questions. ibid.
Society dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behaviour and keeping society under close surveillance and control. ibid.
Nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. ibid.
The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values ... Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up to date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. ibid.
We are not just here to mangle capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values. Tony Benn
If I reflect on the way our society is organised – democracy ought to be a means by which we change the system to meet people’s needs: and it’s been subtly transformed into changing people to meet the needs of the system. And that is the great failure. Tony Benn, Last Will & Testament ***** Youtube 1.31.36
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. Alexis de Tocqueville
When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing. Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
From the late eighteenth century onwards, it is no longer from the practice of community but from being a wanderer that the instinct of fellow-feeling is derived. Thus an essential isolation and silence and loneliness become the carriers of nature and community against the rigours, the cold abstinence, the selfish ease of ordinary society. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. Alan W Watts
Opting out of society was really not an option. Michael Scott, Who Were the Greeks? BBC 2013
Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviours. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
We stand for institutions like marriage and family which are the foundations of our society. George W Bush
The happiness of society is the end of government. John Adams
Each brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant scores of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Why have we not had the will to change a vicious social structure? The Four Horsemen, 2012
Only the government has the power to issue Fiat money but banks can create it through lending … The supply of money has grown exponentially. ibid.
So far, they’ve [Goldman Sachs] got away scot-free with this massive heist. ibid.
The more we grow, the more poverty we create. ibid.
The goal of agorism is the agora. The society of the open marketplace as near to untainted by theft, assault, and fraud as can be humanly attained is as close to a free society as can be achieved. And a free society is the only one in which each and every one of us can satisfy his or her subjective values without crushing others’ values by violence and coercion. Samuel Edward Konkin III
Society today is composed of a series of institutions … There seems to be no system that’s taken for granted and misunderstood as the monetary system. Zeitgeist addendum, 2008
None of it was really yours … Everything I touch and consume and hoard is going to go back in the box and I’m going to lose it all … What matters? Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, 2011
I realised the rules of the economic game were inherently invalid. ibid.
What is acceptable and what is respectable is a highly arbitrary phenomena of society. ibid.
It’s the combination of a susceptible individual and the potentially addictive substance or behaviour that actually then makes for a full flowering of addiction. ibid. Gabor Maté
Is the condition we have created in the modern world actually supporting our health? ibid.
It’s a system disorder, and the system disorder seems to be fatal. ibid.
Efficiency, sustainability and preservation are the enemies of our economic system. ibid.
The economic paradigm we live in now is a Ponzi scheme. ibid.
Two things are inevitable: inflation and bankruptcy. ibid.
What are we, fucking stupid? ibid.
‘We’ve got to change our way of thinking or perish.’ ibid. Fresco
We have to reduce the environment that produces aberrant behaviour. ibid. Fresco
There are many psychopaths that we encounter in our daily lives … What does this mean for human society especially a society that has been structured in a top-down hierarchical fashion in which a very few elite yield through their control of the financial, corporate, governmental and military structures that govern us, almost complete control over vast swathes of the population. The Corbett Report, Our Leaders are Psychopaths, July 2017, James Corbett online
Sometimes we disagree with the person at the top … Does society work best when organised around a strong leader? Or is there another better way? What makes a good leader? The Story of Us with Morgan Freeman s1e5: The Power of Us, National Geographic 2017
Any society that stops people from being who they truly are is bound to fall. ibid.
Lobbying, greed and corruption strip voters of their power. ibid.
The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, cover
Can our way of life survive? Is our civilisation doomed to vanish? ibid. ch1
a) A period of declining rate of expansion; b) It is a period of growing tensions and class conflicts; c) It is a period of increasingly frequent and increasingly violent imperialist wars, and d) It is a period of growing irrationality, pessimism, superstitions and other worldliness. ibid.
The 19th century was marked by i) belief in the innate goodness of man; ii) secularism; iii) belief in progress; iv) liberalism; v) capitalism; vi) faith in science; vii) democracy; viii) nationalism. ibid. ch2
We can divide a society into six aspects: military, political, economic, social, religious, intellectual. ibid.
Goods are an asset; money is a debt. ibid.
The organizational structure for creating means of payment out of nothing, which we call credit, was not invented by England but was developed by her to become one of her chief weapons in the victory over Napoleon in 1815. ibid.
The industrial revolution existed in Britain for almost two generations before it spread elsewhere. ibid.