Quotes About Society

All kinds of maps or models also show, on examination, the personality or mental furniture of their creator, and, to a lesser extent, of the creator's society and linguistic system(s) — the semantic environment.

The origin of heroin – and of morphine; and laudanum, Edgar Allan Poe's habit; and pantopon, the drug popular in addict society back in the 1920s; and Demerol, Hermann Goering's happiness pills; and paregoric; and the codeine that Sherlock Holmes used to cool down his cocaine habit – is the opium poppy. This is probably the most accursed and hated plant in the world, and has been creating addicts in both the East and the West since the dawn of civilization.

Precisely. Every religion is a way of arriving at a certain state of consciousness and every society is based on a particular religion. Naturally, since any state of consciousness can be induced by a specific drug or group of drugs, you are going to find each society accepting certain drugs and bitterly condemning others.

In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until the funding runs out.

You already know the Gregorian calendar. It gets drummed into our heads in our allegedly "secular" "public" schools and everybody in our society who holds Power (banks, corporations, even governments) uses it. My system intends to break the conditioning/hypnosis created by this artificial uniformity.

If we dared to proclaim Straight Pride, we would immediately get accused of homophobia — although the Gay Pride people, most curiously, never, never get accused of heterophobia.

The Third Wave can, and will, transcend this problem within industrialism. The Third Wave will be neither capitalist nor socialist, nor some milkwater blend of the two. It will demand a whole new economy, just as feudalism created an economy unknown to tribal humanity and industrialism created the two competing economies of capitalism and socialism, both unguessed and unpredictable from the perspective of the feudal stage.

Those who take a Dominant imprint in this system seek power all their lives; those with a Submissive imprint seek Dominant types to lead them (the Reichian Fuhrerprinzip) and most people settle somewhere between these extremes, taking a masochist stance toward those above them (government, landlords etc.) and a sadist stance toward selected victims defined as below them (wives, children, inferior races, people on Welfare, etc.).

Again, the traditional system works, for traditional society. A mass made of people who have intense curiosity about why Beethoven went in for string quartets after the Ninth Symphony, or whether Kant really refuted Hume satisfactorily, or what the latest quantum theories mean in relation to Determinism and Free Will, is not a mass that will easily be led into dull, dehumanizing labor at traditional jobs.

It is curious, in passing, that the Women's Liberation Movement, the latest and most revolutionary of these waves, is paradoxically more patrist than much of what preceded it

And with symbolism we can create meaningless metaphysics and Strange Loops so weird that society grows alarmed and either locks us up or insists on medicating us. With such weird symbols, if not locked up or medicated, we can even persuade multitudes to believe in our gibberish and execute 6,000,000 scapegoats (the Hitler case), line up to drink cyanide cocktails (the Jim Jones case), or perform virtually any idiocy or lunacy imaginable.

In logic, there is no escape from a Strange Loop. In pragmatic life, there is an easy escape — reject one part of the system. Sombunall can be very helpful there. A disturbed patient is beginning to recover, for instance, when the last Strange Loop is modified to: A. I must obey sombunall of my parents' Game Rules. B. I must obey sombunall of society's Game Rules.

You are mistaken, he said smoothly. That boy is not your son. He belongs to society and the State, and I am society and the State. I will take him anywhere I want, I will order him to do anything I care to have done, and I will shoot him if he disobeys.

Wilson emphasizes that this model describes not only many, many infamous criminals, but quite a few of the more infamous statesmen and churchmen of history, who were not called criminals only because they were powerful enough to define what was crime in their society. Since these types have a strong power drive, most of history, as Wilson sees it, is Criminal History, the record of the crimes of one type of male.

A social field might be considered a type of energy-field that is highly variable.

Confucius (as the barbarians call him) also taught that, "When the government is honest, the people will learn honesty by example; when the government is crooked, the people will learn to be thieves also.

There can of course be no doubt that any sort of addiction, whether to opiates, barbiturates, or alcohol, is always an evil and always involves slavery. Society, however, when it shoulders responsibility for preventing such abuse, treads on very slippery ground. The real situation tends to become clouded by misconceptions, and legislation is often enacted which tends to aggravate the very evils it was intended to prevent. Robert DeRopp, M.D., Drugs and the Mind

She began to think of TVland as, not just a condensed electronic image or ghost of Reality, but a mask that had undergone considerable editing and rewriting to suit those in charge of Reality Selection for the whole society in which the TV existed. She realized that what the TV showed did not represent a simple Xerox of the Real World but a complicated social "game" — or tacit conspiracy — to pretend a certain set of programs contained all of the Real World.

How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?

This is, of course, the approach taken in those societies that have sought to control drugs by making them sacred and putting them in a religious context, as distinguished from those cultures that seek to control them by passing laws against them. Paradoxical as Crowley's reasoning may sound to most of us, many anthropologists have agreed that drugs are actually less of a social problem in the former context than in the latter.

To review: Each individual has a neurological system, or game, different from other members of the same society. In accord with Einstein's physical relativism, and anthropology's cultural relativism, we call this neurological relativism.

As Thomas Szasz, M.D., points out in The Myth of Mental Illness, many people in our society develop neurotic symptoms or psychosomatic illnesses because the only way to become important in Christian culture is to be conspicuously more pitiful than others.

Liberalism, as in a "normal" Hollywood film, has triumphed over fascism, and we can all feel warm and fuzzy.

For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.