What Geniuses Come To Believe
Submitted by Paul Rosenberg via FreemansPerspective.com,
It recently struck me that the people we think of as “geniuses” tend to arrive, over time, at surprisingly similar sets of conclusions.
It further struck me that a simple list of such thoughts might be of value to my readers.
So, here is a list pulled from my quotes file and presented without commentary. Enjoy:
Albert Einstein
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Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
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Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
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Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.
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The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
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Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
Rod Serling
- The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling.
Arthur Schopenhauer
- We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Thomas Jefferson
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I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
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It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
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I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
Allan Bloom
- The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
John Stuart Mill
- The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.
Leo Tolstoy
- The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens… Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.
Will Durant
- Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the “subject” sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the state.
George Bernard Shaw
- All government is authoritarian; and the more democratic a government is the more authoritative it is; for with the people behind it, it can push authority further than any Tsar or foreign despot dare do.
Aldous Huxley
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So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
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Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
Richard Feynman
- Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity – and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
Buckminster Fuller
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Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.
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If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine.
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We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.
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Either you’re going to go along with your mind and the truth, or you’re going to yield to fear and custom and conditioned reflexes.
Erich Fromm
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The history of mankind up to the present time is primarily the history of idol worship, from primitive idols of clay and wood to the modern idols of the state, the leader, production and consumption – sanctified by the blessing of an idolized God.
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Obedience to God is also the negation of submission to man.
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[I]f one has no possibility of acting, one’s thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.
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Is there really as much difference as we think between the Aztec human sacrifices to their gods and the modern human sacrifices in war to the idols of nationalism and the sovereign state?
Charlie Chaplin
- As for politics, I’m an anarchist. I hate governments and rules and fetters. Can’t stand caged animals. People must be free.
Carl Jung
- For in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him.
Ray Bradbury
- We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
Abraham Maslow
- I can certainly say that descriptively healthy human beings do not like to be controlled. They prefer to feel free and to be free.
Simone Weil
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The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.
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Conscience is deceived by the social.
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Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men – oppressed and oppressors alike – the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels.
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What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.
(35 votes)
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besnook,
commonly attributed to Churchill...but who knows?
If you're not a libertarian then you have neither a heart nor a brain ;)
their god must be really angry with them to send me- ghenghis khan
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible
will make violent revolution inevitable"
...JFK
What revolution? The people at the switches like evrything as it is. Now make plenty of babies because the country needs them in uniform.
This one only for geeks:
"This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security."
That's ooooold technology. I encrypt all my messages in ROT-26.
Einstein? Would that be the same Einstein who was very involved in political lobbying in order to persuade fedgov to create the Manhattan Project?
He was a spy and a patent clerk who gave the us .gov German secrets.
But all jews are saints in the ussa.
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend."
"Inside a dog, it's too dark to read"
~ Groucho Marx
"Time flies like an arrow; Fruit flies like a banana"
-Groucho Marx
"Socialism and prosperity cannot exist at the same place at the same time."
"Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan."
"Intellectual cawardice is the only one of the problems of the academic community. Fort rubbed their noses in the swill generated by their gibberish and illiteracy. It was no secret then or now that academic publications are designed to protect the inept and to conceal ignorance. People with nothing to say, who even lack the ability to say nothing, can hide behind the academic method for a lifetime." John Keel
Enough with the quotes everybody. You might as well scratch your balls.
way ahead of you....
Apathy towards human nature is a sure path to nowhere.
I tried to Share this post and was denied. I then e-mailed it to myself, was thanked by ZH for spreading ZH, but the mail never arrived. ???
Edward Snowden is that you?
I can tell you from afar (Australia) that you're on the wrong track. Edward Snowden no longer works for the NSA.
I am not sure who is interested in hiding wisdom, but me may find out one day.
Due to the unpredictability, unreliability, and insecurity of digital communication emails to this address shall not have any legal validity, even when your terms and conditions say otherwise. Now do your online banking!
Hey Genius, I would kindly thank you to please stop sending your shit to my email account.
Oh... That's where it went.
the Scientist is dead
.
long live science
'Annnnd it's gone'
Trey Parker/Matt Stone
"Fame nothing more than a good seat at a restaurant" or something like........
bowie
If you're going to be stupid, you better be tough.
"It is an immoral act to allow a sucker to keep his money." -P.T. Barnum
"Smart motherfuckers sound like crazy motherfuckers to dumb motherfuckers"
-Yoda Einstein Lincoln
Can I give to another person, or group of people, authority that I do not have?
I refuse to believe that Albert Einstein said ANY of those things. The man was a fucking physicist. If you needed to know where a gold atom was flying through a vacuum at any given moment, he was the man to ask. But philosophy? BULLshit. Physics and philosophy go together like Champagne and shit on ritz crackers.
I disagree. Physics in its essence is observational philosophy. They try to answer the same fundamental question: "What the fuck is going on here?"
"Physics and philosophy go together like Champagne and shit on ritz crackers."
I take it you are neither, and don't enjoy life either - to each his own
"I don't drink water, fish fuck in it." -W.C. Fields
"If the whiskey don't kill me, I'll live till I die."
Tex Ritter
If trouble dont kill me Lord Ill live a long time!
Jerry Garcia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPlZJ9m3Qdw
"Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. That way when you criticize him he'll be a mile away, and you'll have his shoes"
-Jack Handey
"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be ... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists." - MLK
My homeboy genius wrote (and my t-shirt declares) "Government is the negation of liberty" von Mises.
But the quotation that speaks to my heart and should probably be engraved on my tombstone (were I to have one, which I'm not) is Oscar Wilde's "No good deed goes unpunished". Struth!
"The problem with posting quotations on the internet is that it is difficult to verify their authenticity..."
.......Abraham Lincoln
Diderot: "Men will never be free until the last king is hung by the entrails of the last priest"
Shakespeare: "The first thing we do, is to kill all the lawyers"
Kirk2NCC1701: "The first thing we do, is convert Central Bankers into Musollini Piñatas."
i love a great quote same as the next guy. when a proverb accrues any measure of collective esteem, it makes me feel there's others out there thinking in ways most conducive to comity, amity and fraternity...or when common approbation for all that is contrary to those virtues is in another adage broadly adopted, i swoon over that shit, too; in either case, it's nice to know you're not alone in your thinking.
but, when we go so far as to assess mankind against the abstract potential found in proverbs, it is both a profound injustice and false premise. most people are stupid and selfish; and in spite of this we scale our fellow creatures to standards divine and academic, though none of us have shown success or even promise in our struggle against the grave.
and that's what this is all about. in all of every altruistic axiom and aphorism there is implicit this expectation that humans amend their behavior in accord with thinking which presumes an infinite store of tomorrows; and furthermore that these same humans commit their efforts to enterprises representing benefits for they as participants in endless tomorrows yielding endless promise -- yet they as participants will all surely die; and they all surely come to know it.
the reality is that humans individually and collectively brace against the grave and all that is of it explicit. preserving against the tomb hopelessly and at the same time tirelessly is an ethic in and of itself; moreover, it is 'the' ethic to which all others are subordinate.
for janus, there are only two fixed references about which the substance of any proverb orbits as to gravity: the grave or God.
the truth of the grave is empirical and evident, and the relative truth of a grave-referenced proverb is in relation to its orbital position to death's cycle. all organisms are composed of and and at the same time composing other organisms, and all are at some stage of expansion or contraction therewith -- we are both infinitely complex in all things micro within, and our relationship to greater dynamos without moving infinitely to the macro universe and beyond is unfathomable -- this is the inscrutable truth and paradox of our existence & consciousness viz the grave and infinity.
is there hope for mankind, the future and all its tomorrows? sure, but only for some and not for others; and even for those others, only for a short time of numbered tomorrows (relative to the grave).
it's amusing to janus watching people of noble intent attempting to kindle hot coals from dying embers. but the wise man knows there are not bellows big enough to bring ashes to blazes. and, sadly, my friends, that is the situation before us -- an epoch eclipsing before our eyes and nothing left to stoke it back to animation.
how can the new and the next rise side-by-side with a cadaverous lazarus? lazarus once lay limp and lifeless; the spark of his soul briefly reinvested; only for the tomb to soon swallow him again -- so what was the point in all that, anyway?
whatever the case, this world being one giant organism composed of seemingly infinite subordinate organisms is aware -- on both a micro and macro level -- that its day is done. if there is any certainty held in common by all the individual organisms composing the lazarus-like leviathan of civilization, it is that there is something better awaiting all of us (individually & collectively) than what presently is. and that, my friends, spells trouble. it is an existential confrontation with death on an ecumenical level; and death has a psychology all its own. it knows it's coming, yet does all it can to forestall it.
it's funny: death is inevitable, unacceptable and intolerable; and in all this time we haven't come up with an alternative.
anyway, all the proverbs regarding growth are true in cycles of growth. this world's civilization is no longer growing, and that reality is suddenly present in a civilization predicated on growth (but, to be fair, all civilizations are predicated on growth).
as for the world and its present civilization, the pall of death is settling over it; and its psychology will be a function of this awareness. it will be a rapid and violent reflex to preservation, and a contraction into various citadels of protection from all enemies -- both foreign and domestic.
apart from that, there is a feature common among all genius: an awareness of its preciousness and rarity.
here is wisdom:
"a little leaven leavens the whole lump." (selah)
do not for one moment think that any of the competing polarities will in this global struggle 'win'; for although they appear in some fashion distinct, they are all of the same system. this is a death spiral hurtling to a point of transit about an orbit; a pivot of renewal and rebirth. there is not adequate variation in the genetics of this world's powers; and they are for that reason all subject to the same virus now attacking it...sorta like the cavendish banana rot thing, understood societally.
philosophically relevant anecdote: janus used to frequent a deli in augusta, ga called "The Sunshine Deli"...it was on broad st. (i think). to this day, best rye bread and navy-bean soup i've ever had. interesting thing about this deli, they were using a pinch from an original loaf of rye bread going back some sixty years...and that from a rye loaf imported from another rye loaf of similarly estimable pedigree from another successful deli. each time a new lump of lifeless flour, oil and water sparked to swell and puff at the introduction of this tiny ark of dough impregnated with the life of yeast preserved from its progenitor. as for each lump's progenitor...every time it rose to its peak and perfection, it was baked in a fire and then promptly consumed (but not before The Baker pinched a lump for the sake of life).
as for the nature of The Baker's fire, a single ember is plucked from a dying fire's ash heap and added to a new stack of fuel...and the cycle renews for both bread and fire.
it is my great hope that an ark of genius is preserved by The Great Baker to leaven the next lump...for the fires of armegeddon are now kindled.
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all,
That is not it, at all.”
happy new year,
janus
"when the fuck did we get ice cream?" - Winston.
"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best…"
"If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT."
"Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."
"Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow."
- Frank Zappa
Thank you Paul - Great article - just what we needed ;)
The most important
of those quotations:
Richard Feynman
Although entertaining to read, none of the other quotations provided any good answers regarding the apparent cause of government stupidity.
Essentially, that is the WRONG QUESTION, asked in the WRONG WAY. The presumption of "government stupidity" may be referred to as Hanlon's Razon:
STUPIDITY only applies through a superficially correct analysis that deliberately does NOT examine the actual history the triumphs of organized crime, manifesting on larger and larger scales, which, for the previous few Centuries, and ever more so in the previous few decades, have been the triumphs of the international bankers achieving their goals, as stated by the historian Carroll Quigley:
"powers of financial capitalism
had another far-reaching goal,
nothing less than 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 ..."
However, that history is more like archaeology now, because the successful creation of those ENFORCED FRAUDS has driven the BIG BANKS to become inconceivably BIG expressions of runaway crazy corruption, similar to the degree to which electronics and atomic energy exceeds the common sense of the vast majority of people.
People who have adapted to living inside of social systems based on enforced frauds have simultaneously developed attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance, related to the deeply paradoxical nature of the social successes that were based upon those triumphantly enforced frauds. Those attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance applied all across the board, from the resulting social polarization, to the destruction of the natural world, to accumulate consequences that have gone beyond ordinary human comprehension.
Those who tend to rely upon Hanlon's Razor presumptions are willing and able to only look at the ways that the vicious spirals of POLITICAL FUNDING ENFORCING FRAUDS are publicly misrepresented because the international bankers, as the biggest gangsters, the banksters, have been able to persistently apply the methods of organized crime to the political processes, sufficiently to result in almost all of the successful politicians becoming those banksters' puppets, who are voted for by enough of the masses of muppets, who were misinformed throughout their entire lives by their schools and mass media. While those politicians and the people that vote for them appear to be incompetently stupid, that social situation was driven by the history of successfully applying the methods of organized crime through the political processes, such as by bribery, intimidation, as well as assassination of those who could not otherwise be bribed or intimidated.
The intense paradoxes of human intelligence were primarily due to its greatest social successes being based on reducing other people to become more incompetent political idiots. The intelligence of the ruling classes waged war against the consciousness of those they ruled over. That social situation is perceived by those who rely upon Hanlon's Razor as being that there was nothing but the apparent stupidity of the politicians and their voters.
Those who are able and willing to rely upon Hanlon's Razor, that somehow the monetary system is stupid, rather than the result of the triumph of organized crime, are then able to continue to operate INSIDE of the same frame of reference that all the other mainstream morons tend to still take for granted, and then, able to promote bogus "solutions" presented by reactionary revolutionaries, which do not have to think more deeply about how and why the EXISTING systems are based upon public governments ENFORCING FRAUDS by private banks, which fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems dominate EVERYTHING that the political economy is doing, including the wild oscillations of the price of oil, which have various counter-intuitive and paradoxical effects, since being able to back up lies with violence still never stops those lies from being false. Rather, the longer term results are that systems based upon ENFORCING FRAUDS drive civilization as a whole to become criminally insane, due to the excessive successfulness of the applications of the methods of organized crime through the political processes, which require that most people neither understand that, nor want to understand that.
Moreover, the full story is WAY WORSE, because there must necessarily be some death control systems. However, the existing systems were driven to become most socially successful by becoming the most deceitful and treacherous, which were the basis for building financial successfulness upon ENFORCING FRAUDS. The deeper levels of the situation are due to natural selection pressures driving the development of human intelligence, which was applied to the most important selection pressures, through the history of warfare and economics, to become the currently existing sociopolitical systems based upon the maximum possible deceits and frauds, being operated by the best available professional hypocrites.
The most important sets of consistent contradictions are those driven by prodigious progress in physical science, having gone through series of profound paradigm shifts, while NONE of that has been allowed to happen in political science. Being able to use inanimate energy sources required scientific progress in understanding general energy systems. Of course, human beings and civilization are manifestations of general energy systems, however, those were driven by natural selection pressures to become sociopolitical systems based upon more or less organized lies operating robberies, wherein those who were the best at doing that were able to dominate society. Hence, that society ended up being thereby brainwashed to believe in the biggest bullies' bullshit world views, regarding pretty well everything.
Most of the prodigious progress in physical science based upon profound paradigm shifts understanding energy systems through unitary mechanisms has NOT been allowed to happen in political science! Rather, politics continues being almost totally dominated by the biggest bullies' bullshit, which has become the bankster controlled governments ENFORCING FRAUDS, being able to present everything that political economy actually does in the most absurdly backward ways possible.
IF, IF, IF, one moves beyond presuming upon Hanlon's Razor, then the real problems become almost infinitely worse to face, (which is probably why so few people do so.) The real debt controls were always backed by the death controls. The real history of the development of resources was always dominated by organized crime repeating fractally on every level, including in previous world wars. Furthermore, that also included the history of alcohol prohibition, and the War on Drugs, as well as the current War on Terror, all being manifestations of the ways that governments became the biggest forms of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals.
Therefore, any realistic resolutions of the real problems will require changes in the death control systems in general, with changes in the murder systems being the most extreme form of those. Such changes ought to be based upon intellectual scientific revolutions, which enable profound paradigm shifts in the ways that we perceive how and why the debt controls were backed by the death controls, and thus, directed the ways that the political economy actually worked.
At the present time, people who are content to rely upon using Hanlon's Razor, to interpret the social situation, are able to thereby deliberately avoid recognizing that militarism is the supreme ideology, and therefore, do not have to integrate any changes in the human murder systems into their proposals for changes in other facets of human economic activities.
BASICALLY, ALL OF THE QUOTES ABOVE DO NOT ADDRESS THE DEEPER ISSUES REGARDING THAT HUMAN BEINGS CAN NOT CREATE ENERGY OUT OF NOTHING, NOR SEND ENERGY TO NOTHING. Indeed, almost nobody who prattles on about "freedom" and "liberty" ever bothers to reconcile those kinds of transcendental political poetry with the basic laws of nature. Approaches towards doing so require series of intellectual scientific revolutions, that integrate and surpass the profound paradigm shifts already achieved in physical science being applied to political science.
For those with a sufficiently macabre sense of humour, the deeper reasons for apparent governmental stupidity are painfully obvious! Militarism is the supreme ideology of the murder systems, because the most important thing that human beings do is kill each other. Intense paradoxes have arisen due to the history of the successful warfare being based upon deceits and treacheries, gradually morphing to become successful finance based upon enforcing frauds.
Meanwhile, those systems became almost totally dominated by the best available professional hypocrites, who developed the language which would express through dualities their false fundamental dichotomies and related impossible ideals. Therefore, not only do all the problems tend to be presented by professional hypocrites to be the opposite of what those really are, but also, all of the publicly significant "solutions" are also presented as opposite to what those would really have to be.
Governments exist because organized crime exists. Organized crime exists because the chronic political problems inherent in the nature of life require death control systems, which develop to become most socially successful by becoming the most deceitful and fraudulent. Meanwhile, those who tend to like the transcendental political poetry regarding "freedom" and "liberty" tend to continue to NEVER admit and address the SOURCES OF SLAVERY, which are the limits to which human beings can NOT create energy out of nothing, nor send energy to nothing. Since those who tend to most love that kind of transcendental political poetry about "freedom" tend to never bother to attempt to reconcile their impossible ideals with the basic laws of nature, they make NO progress in their thinking, and certainly do NOT go through the series of scientific revolutions that such "genius" would require.
I enjoyed reading those quotes cited in the article above, and agreed most with the one that was selected to be featured FIRST:
Albert Einstein
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
However, that kind of "unthinking respect for authority" is WAY MORE PROFOUND than anything else that follows in the subsequent quotations, especially because NONE of those provide any better answers to Feynman's point.
Natural selection pressures drove their internalization as human intelligence, which was primarily applied to the most important selection pressures from other groups of humans. Hence, the history of warfare, upon which the history of economics was actually based. Therefore, the most abstract form of that became that money is measurement backed by murder. As soon as life exists, then the death control systems direct the evolution of that life. Indeed, natural selection pressures are real, the same as water or air pressures. Those are simply more systematic.
Human beings and civilization living as entropic pumps of environmental energy flows necessarily match the principles and methods of organized crime, because the death control systems are central to everything else. Human beings and civilization, to the degree that we perceive and define them as separate from their environment and each other, necessarily live as gangs of robbers.
Civilization has been based on almost exponential progress in physical science and technology, as applied to the most important issues, which were the human death control systems in general, and the murder systems in particular. Therefore, IF, IF, IF, there was going to be any operational definitions of "freedom" or "liberty" that could actually work, then those would have to be expressed through developing better death control systems, that made greater use of information and thereby enabled higher consciousness regarding how and why militarism, as the ideology of the murder systems, was the supreme ideology, as well as deserved to be.
Governments are necessarily the biggest forms of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals. Most of the quotations above tend to only superficially point that out. Governments are basically military organizations. One should engage in deeper understanding of militarism in order to better understand governments. There can NOT be NO government because there can NOT be NO organized crime, because there can NOT be NO death control systems.
THE DEEPER POLITICAL PROBLEMS ARE DUE TO THAT THERE ARE, AND MUST BE, SOME DEATH CONTROL SYSTEMS, WHILE THE ONES THAT WERE SELECTED TO ACTUALLY SURVIVE WERE THOSE THAT WERE THE MOST DECEITFUL AND TREACHEROUS, UPON WHICH BASIS DEVELOPED POLITICAL ECONOMY BASED UPON PUBLIC GOVERNMENTS ENFORCING FRAUDS BY PRIVATE BANKS.
While "freedom" or "liberty" may be reconciled with the concepts of thermodynamics and information theory, etc., doing so ends up being the opposite to what most people promoting those notions tend to promote. IF one wishes for a better world, then that must be based upon developing better death control systems, despite that being extremely problematic, due to the degree that all of the historically best murder systems ended up being most successful by becoming most deceitful and treacherous, which then became the foundation for fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems to dominate the political economy.
RECONCILIATION OF HUMAN ARTIFICIAL SELECTION SYSTEMS WITH NATURAL SELECTIONS SYSTEMS IS WHAT "GENIUSES" SHOULD DO, ESPECIALLY SINCE THERE NOW EXIST GLOBALIZED ELECTRONIC MONKEY MONEY FRAUDS, BACKED BY THE THREAT OF FORCE FROM APES WITH ATOMIC BOMBS.
HOWEVER, AT THE PRESENT TIME, NONE OF THAT KIND OF GENIUS WHICH MADE ELECTRONICS AND ATOMIC ENERGY POSSIBLE IS APPLIED TO POLITICAL SCIENCE. INSTEAD, WE MOSTLY TEND TO GET REPETITIONS OF QUOTATIONS SUCH AS THOSE ABOVE, WHICH DO NOT ANSWER WHAT WAS CORRECTLY STATED AS THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION!
The quicksand that they fall into is the death control. Natural selection pressures demand that there must be some death control systems. Human artificial selection systems MUST have their death controls as their central feature. The actual history of that through the history of civilization driven by the imperatives of warfare were what made the currently existing kinds of social slavery systems, which may be considered to have become like "human farming of humans," whose most sophisticated current manifestation is the debt slavery systems that work through public governments enforcing frauds by private banks.
However, the degrees to which the biggest bullies' bullshit world views have dominated civilization, including the various controlled opposition groups that surrounded the core organized crime groups, have resulted in the almost totally deceitfulness of the discussion of the death control systems to dominate civilization. Hence, the dead-end duality, as false fundamental dichotomy between "freedom" versus "tyranny," and so forth, while what actually exists, and must necessarily exist, could only be the dynamic equilibria between different systems of organized lies operating robberies, operating through unitary mechanisms via human energy systems.
Most of the apparent "government stupidity" is due to them actually operating their real death controls through the maximum possible deceits, which then uphold operating their monetary and taxation systems through the maximum possible enforcement of frauds. Actually resolving any chronic political problems any better would require better murder systems backing up better money systems. Nothing less would work. The only way to have better government is to have better organized crime.
There are surely intense paradoxes, which manifest as sets of consistent contradictions, due to the ways that human beings and civilization, are NEVER separate from their environment, nor absolutely separate from each other. Therefore, all of the biggest bullies' bullshit world views that promote those notions are profoundly wrong and misleading. Moreover, those old-fashioned notions regarding time and space, and entropy as the distribution of energy through time and space, have been PROVEN to be profoundly wrong and backwards, by geniuses like Einstein and Fenyman.
HOWEVER, one will almost never see any thinking like that being applied in political science. Rather, in politics, one tends to only observe ad nauseam repetitions of old-fashioned religions and ideologies, which deliberately do NOT change their metaphysics in order to attempt to better reconcile those with progress in mathematical physics. Rather, so far, the biggest bullies' bullshit world views have more dominated the history of the philosophy of science, rather than that the philosophy of science has been able to change the dominance of the biggest bullies' bullshit.
Therefore, at the present time, the debt slavery systems have generated numbers which have become debt insanities, which are headed towards provoking death insanities. Ideally, that should motivate people to think in radically different ways about the death control systems in general, and the combined money/murder systems in particular. However, by and large, at best, in the public spaces, we only observe superficially correct analysis of those problems, which never becomes any deeper analysis.
So far, there have been NO significant political science geniuses, because there are NO significant groups of people who want to appreciate that. The best we got in the quotations above was that Richard Fenyman at least pointed out what the basic problem appeared to be, but otherwise, all the rest mostly continued to still operate WITHIN fundamental "unthinking respect for authority!"
"[...] nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity [...]"
.....despite having spent USD trillions in trying to diagnose it.
good one, smacker. but imho the answer is simple: take smart individuals, form a group... and watch how the group will be less smart in it's actions
the takeaway from above is this, for me: "Governments exist because organized crime exists"
indeed, take government away and you have groups organizing themselves to fill out this power vacuum. up to the point where it becomes the same
we are smart human beings that spontanously form less-smart-then-us groups. and... we often only think we are smart