Kent W

“Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Technocrats live their lives abstractly, even while they are managing their own sphere. For them, all problems are intellectual. You must think constantly, and that thinking makes action possible. Once you have thought, the doing simply follows. Reason leads to language, and the battleground of the technocrat is language. If the language is reshaped, so will be the action. Political correctness, as it’s called, is the manner in which the technocrats as the ascendant class reshaped the world. The tension of the technocracy is between their work in their own fields and the universal principles that they practice. This shows itself most clearly in the way they deal with the declining class, the heavily white, industrial working class. In the thinking of the technocracy, the fundamental cause of oppression is whites who have historically oppressed using race, nationality, and gender. But the technocrats draw a sharp distinction between themselves (predominantly white) who are at least engaged in a struggle to transcend oppression in thought and speech and those whites who continue to practice it. This declining class is plunging economically, but for the technocracy, which embraces a vast range of incomes, that decline is not of the essence. It is their unwillingness to abandon oppression.”
― George Friedman, The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

“All rebels are closet aristocrats. That’s why I can convert them so easily.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves,’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.”
― CS Lewis