Quotes about society

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.

If a society thinks it needs weapons, it must accept killing. If it thinks it needs violent men, it must accept rapine and assault.

It is far more important to establish a civil and orderly society than it is to pander to abusive cultural and religious artifacts.

“All societies maintain themselves by forcing personal behavior into a mold or pattern which the society calls its ‘culture.’ The patterns are imposed by natural or political conditions; for example, either recurrent drought or recurrent persecution can result in similar patterns. Most patterns require changes in behavior, and that requires changes in belief systems, or vice versa, sort of chicken and egg as to which comes first.

“So a few thousand years go by and the climate changes, or the politics, but the people still follow the same taboos because by now they believe their deity ordered them to do it. Long-practiced behaviors that started as a response to conditions, always fossilize into ‘traditional values,’ that is, the only ‘right way’ to do things. At that point people no longer use the system in order to survive, the system uses them in order to survive. That’s something people often don’t understand. Systems are parasitical, they have a life of their own, and they, too, evolve and change and try to survive. The one factor that is true of all cultures, without exception, is that it never represents the free desires of the people who are jammed into it even when people are conditioned from childhood to accept uniformation.”

“Really?” asked Ellin. “Never?”

Questioner grinned at her. “Only mavericks live in accordance with their desires, and even they don’t often get away with it. They are usually labeled as troublemakers and gotten rid of.”

“But you’re saying all societies are coercive,” said Ellin in a troubled voice.

Questioner laughed. “But Honorable Ellin, of course they are. This is what makes reading history so amusing. Most cultures think of themselves as free while regarding others as coerced. They do so because they are following traditional values, and the generations of coercion that resulted in those values is long forgotten.”

The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.

It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him.

Conscience is deceived by the social. Our supplementary energy (imaginative) is to a great extent taken up with the social. It has to be detached from it. That is the most difficult of detachments.

The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice: gold is of the social order. In the case of ambition: power is of the social order. Science and art are full of the social element also. And love? Love is more or less of an exception: that is why we can go to God through love, not through avarice and ambition.

The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.

No one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them!

The fabric of our complex society is woven too tightly to permit any part of it to be damaged without damaging the whole.