Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed page 219

They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist's notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour page 180

Due to their heavy workload, and the unchanged sexual division of labour in the household, women's political participation in the Soviet Union is generally low, particularly in rural areas. As political gatherings take place outside working hours, that is, mainly in the evening, women who have to do the shopping, cooking, and housekeeping after their work on farms or in factories are not able to attend such meetings. All reports admit that, due to the burden of household responsibilities, women cannot compete with men over hours and commitment in political activities. The consequence is that they are even more under-represented among political decision-making bodies.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour page 88

[T]he church, the state, the new capitalist class and modern scientists collaborated in the violent subjugation of women and nature. The weak Victorian women of the nineteenth century were the products of the terror methods by which this class had moulded and shaped 'female nature' according to its interests.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 27-28

If now, in spite of all the highly praised achievements of 'civilization', women under this system are still raped, beaten, molested, humiliated, tortured by men, a few serious questions arise which beg an answer:

1. If violence against women is not accidental but part of modern capitalist patriarchy, then we have to explain why this is so. If we reject a biologistic explanation--as I do--we have to look for reasons which are central to the functioning of the system as such.
   
2. If we include the so-called private sphere into the sphere of the economy and politics--as feminists do--then the claim that capitalism has transformed all extra-economic violence or coercion into economic coercion--a position held by Marxists--cannot be upheld.
   
3. In the political sphere, the state monopoly over direct violence obviously stops at the door of the private family.
   
4. If this is so, then the line dividing the 'private' from the 'public' is necessarily the same line that divides 'private' male violence (rule of might) from regulated state violence (rule of right).
   
5. Hence, as far as women are concerned, the hope that in civilized or 'modern' society the 'rule of right' would replace the 'rule of might'--as the old women's movement had hoped--has not been borne out. Both co-exist side by side.
   
6. Again, if this co-existence is not just accidental or the result of survivals of 'barbaric' times, as some interpret it, then obviously we have to come to a different understanding of what civilization or capitalist patriarchy is.

Hence, the problem of violence around which women in all countries mobilized leads to a radical questioning of the accepted views on the social system we live in.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour page 17

The strategy of dividing the economy up into 'visible' and 'invisible' sectors is not at all new. It has been the method of the capitalist accumulation process right from its beginning. The invisible parts were per definition excluded from the 'real' economy. But they constituted in fact the very foundations for the visible economy. These excluded parts were/are the internal and external colonies of capital: the housewives in the industrialized countries and the colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Due to the welfare provisions and the social security systems in Europe and the USA, the creation of an informal sector does not yet by itself make this sector a lucrative hunting ground for exploitation and accumulation. Only by simultaneously cutting down state expenditure on social welfare can the governments force the people who are thrown out of the formal sector to accept any work at any wage and any condition in order to produce their own survival. This means, in the last analysis, that the conditions which are prevailing for the vast majority of people in the underdeveloped world are returning to the centres of capitalism. Although for the time being the standard of living of the masses of people in the overdeveloped countries is still much higher than that in Third World countries, structurally the situation of people in the informal sector is approaching that of most people in the underdeveloped countries.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 15-16

As long as the Western economies were experiencing an ever-expanding growth of their GNPs they could afford to neutralize social dissent and social unrest like that of the women by throwing some crumbs to such disenchanted groups. Under the pressure of the women's movement, certain reforms were introduced like a certain liberalization of the abortion laws, reforms of divorce laws, etc. And in some countries, as in Holland, the state even created commissions for the emancipation of women, and women's action and consciousness-raising groups could demand state support for their activities. Also, in the USA departments of women's studies were established in most universities without great opposition. Although this all needed a lot of struggle from the women's movement, there was a certain paternalistic benevolence in granting 'the girls' a certain niche in the system. Already at this stage the various patriarchal establishments used their power to co-opt women and to integrate their rebellion into the system. But the deepening of the economic crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, and the rise of conservative governments and tendencies in most Western countries with their new policies of restructuring the economy also marked the end of fair-weather or welfare-state feminism. In several countries, particularly in the USA and West Germany, conservative governments launched a virtual attack on some of the half-hearted reforms achieved under the pressure of the new women's movement, above all on the liberalized abortion laws. This roll-back strategy with its renewed emphasis on the patriarchal family, on heterosexuality, on the ideology of motherhood, on women's 'biological' destiny, their responsibility for housework and childcare, and the overall attack on feminism had the effect that women who had hoped that women's liberation could come as a result of some legal reforms or consciousness-raising withdrew from the movement or or even became hostile to it....

This roll-back strategy, however, is only the political manifestation of more fundamental structural changes in the Western economies which are usually referred to as 'flexibilization of labour'. Women are the immediate targets of this strategy. The new strategy of rationalization, computerization and automation of production processes and jobs in the service sector has the effect that women are the first to be pushed out of well-paid, qualified and secure jobs in the 'formal sector'. But they are not just being sent back to home and hearth. They are in fact pushed into a whole range of unqualified, low-paid, insecure jobs which they have to do on top of their housework, which, more than ever, is considered their true vocation. And, contrary to the official conservative ideology on women and the family, the family is no longer a place where women can be sure to find their material existence secured. Man-the-breadwinner, though still the main ideological figure behind the new policies, is empirically disappearing from the stage. Not only does the rising unemployment of men make their role of breadwinner a precarious one, but marriage for women is also no longer an economic guarantee of their lifelong livelihood.

Joanna Russ, "SF and Technology as Mystification," in To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction page 31

[A]ddictive culture deals with issues people feel to be crucial in their lives, but instead of confronting these issues, addictive art merely reconfirms the values and internalized pressures that produced the issues in the first place. Addictive art is briefly palliating; the relief lasts only as long as the art does and one is left more needy than before, i.e., the cravings that were promised relief are now worse.

Star Wars, I think, addresses itself to a dim but powerful desire for "fun," i.e., excitement and self-importance. These are human desires and not bad ones, but the film satisfies them by simplifying morality, politics, and human personality to the point where they can all safely be ignored in the interests of the "fun." However, morality, politics, and human personality are most of the world and the film cannot actually do without them without renouncing drama altogether. Thus we have a work in which the result of the simplification isn't to banish morality, politics, and human personality (which is impossible) but to present them in their most reactionary--and dullest--form. Thus monarchies are better than republics, slavery is noble (the machines are conscious personalities endowed with emotions and free will but it is still unquestionably right to own them), everyone human in the film is white (with the possible exception of one extra in one scene), and after the hero's mother (disguised as his aunt to avoid the real parenticidal wishes no doubt present in the teenagers in the audience) dies, there is only one woman left in the entire universe. This universe then goes into terrific plot convulsions to aid, nurture, and glorify one very ordinary white, heterosexual, male, bucktoothed virgin.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 49-50

Ultimately, this mounting class conflict [in the 13th to 15th centuries] brought about a new alliance between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, without which proletarian revolts may not have been defeated. It is difficult, in fact, to accept the claim, often made by historians, according to which these struggles had no chance of success due to the narrowness of their political horizons and the "confused nature of their demands." In reality, the objectives of the peasants and artisans were quite transparent. They demanded that "every man should have as much as another" (Pirenne 1937: 202) and, in order to achieve this goal, they joined with all those "who had nothing to lose," acting in concert, in different regions, not afraid to confront the well-trained armies of the nobility, despite their lack of military skills.

If they were defeated, it was because all the forces of feudal power--the nobility, the Church, and the bourgeoisie--moved against them, united, despite their traditional divisions, by their fear of proletarian rebellion. Indeed, the image that has been handed down to us, of a bourgeoisie perennially at war with the nobility, and carrying on its banners the call for equality and democracy, is a distortion. By the late Middle Ages, wherever we turn, from Tuscany to England the the Low Countries, we find the bourgeoisie already allied with the nobility in the suppression of the lower classes. For in the peasants and the democratic weavers and cobblers of its cities, the bourgeoisie recognized an enemy far more dangerous than the nobility--one that made it worthwhile for the burghers even to sacrifice their cherished political autonomy. Thus, it was the urban bourgeoisie, after two centuries of struggles waged in order to gain full sovereignty within the walls of its communes, who reinstituted the power of the nobility, by voluntarily submitting to the rule of the Prince, the first step on the road to the absolute state.

[Citation references Henri Pirenne's Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe.]

Robert Sheckley, Journey Beyond Tomorrow (in the Dimensions of Sheckley Omnibus) page 173

I had never known about this state of affairs, since news like this is generally ignored in a democracy, and is banned in a dictatorship.

Robert Sheckley, Journey Beyond Tomorrow (in the Dimensions of Sheckley Omnibus) page 163

Joenes said, "I stand upon my Constitutional rights, namely the First and Fifth Amendments, and respectfully decline to answer."

Pelops smiled thinly. "You may not do so, Mr. Joenes, since the Constitution to which you now so fervently cling has been reinterpreted, or rather brought up to date, by those of us who wish to preserve it from change and desecration. The Amendments you mention, Mr. Joenes--or should I say Comrade Joenes--will not permit you to be silent for reasons which any judge of the Supreme Court would have been glad to tell you--had you chosen to ask him!"

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 2: Resistance pages 861-862

The endpoint of civilization is assembly-line mass murder. The assembly-line mass murder of the Nazi Holocaust is production stripped of the veneer of economics. It is the very essence of production. It took the living and converted them to the dead. That's what this culture does. It was efficient, it was calculable, it was predictable, and it was controlled through nonhuman technologies. And it was also, as well as being grossly immoral, incredibly stupid. Even from the perspective of pure acquisitiveness and land-hunger, it was self-defeating. As German troops froze and starved on the Eastern Front, valuable railroad cars were used instead to move cargos that fed crematoria. The Nazis performed economic analyses showing that feeding slaves just a bit more increased their productivity more than enough to offset the extra cost of feed. Yet they were starved. Similarly, slaughtering Russians was foolish. Many Ukrainians and Russians greeted the Wehrmacht with kisses, open arms, and flowers, happy to be out from under the tyranny of Stalinism. The Germans quickly began murdering noncombatants to make room for the Germans who would move in after the war, or because they were told to, or because Russians were inferior, or for any of the reasons given for these slaughters since the beginning of civilization's wars of extermination. And so Russian noncombatants fought back. They blew up trains, they killed German officers, they picked off individual soldiers. They hurt the Germans. For all their vaunted rationality, the Germans weren't so very rational, were they?

Of course we're different now. We have rational reasons for the killings. There's no silly talk of master races and lebensraum. Instead, the economy is run along strictly rationalist lines. If something makes money, we do it, and if it doesn't, we don't (ignore for a moment that to divorce economics from morals and humanity is as evil as it is to do the same for science). But the United States economy costs at least five times as much as it's worth. Total annual U.S. corporate profits are about $500 billion, while the direct costs of the activities from which these profits derive are more than $2.5 trillion. These include $51 billion in direct subsidies and $53 billion in tax breaks, $274.7 billion lost because of deaths from workplace cancer, $225.9 billion lost because of the health costs of stationary source air pollution, and so on. This is to speak only of calculable costs, since other values--such as a living planet--do not, because they're not calculable, exist. The fact remains, however, that it is manifestly stupid to destroy your landbase, regardless of the abstract financial reward or esteem you may gain. Yet this culture spends more to build and maintain commercial fishing vessels than the fiscal value of the fish caught. The same is true for the destruction of forests. In the United States the Forest Service loses in a not atypical year $400 million dollars [sic] on its timber sale program, or about seven hundred and seventy-nine dollars per acre deforested.

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 2: Resistance pages 775-777

I think we can take Besayev and the killers at their word, that this killing was done in retribution for the killing of their own children: you kill ours, we kill yours, fair enough? But I believe it's also true that the Chechens were trying to send a message which I believe would run something like this: stop killing our children. The next question is: to whom are they trying to send the message? If they're trying to send it to the people of Beslan, I think they're trying to send it to the wrong people. I think it's safe to say that Russia is no more of a democracy than the United States, which means even if the people of Beslan receive the message loud and clear--even if they're terrorized into not supporting Russia's occupation of Chechnya--if probably won't cause the Russian government to withdraw from Chechnya. The people from Beslan almost undoubtedly have no more influence on Russian policy than the people of Crescent City, California have on United States policy.

I'd imagine Besayev and the others are fully aware of this. This makes me suspect that their message was intended not just for the people of Beslan but for Putin and the others who run the Russian government, those who could actually make the decision to withdraw from Chechnya. But there's a big problem with this logic: it presumes that Putin and others of the Russian elite give a shit about the people of Beslan, an extremely doubtful proposition. Consider the United States: do you think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney care about your life, or the lives of your family? Their rhetoric aside, do you think they honestly care about the lives of American citizens? Do you think they care more for human beings than for corporations, production, personal financial gain, or increasing their personal and political power? If so, how could they possibly promote the use of pesticides? How could they promote the toxification of the total environment, with the consequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year? If Bush, Cheney, and company cared about human lives, they would help us to prepare for the end of civilization. But they don't. They don't care about humans in general. They don't care about American citizens. They don't care about this or that small town. If Chechens obliterated the entire town of Crescent City, California, certainly the United States would use that as an excuse to bump up repression at home and to conquer yet another oil-extracting country, but I can guarantee you George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would feel no pain.

The same holds true for retribution. The point of retribution seems to be: you cause me pain, and I cause you pain so you know how it feels. But I'm guessing Putin feels no pain over the deaths of these children. He undoubtedly feels a bit of panic as he tries to deal with the public relations nightmare this situation has created. But pain? No.

Putin will almost undoubtedly follow Jefferson's lead in saying, "In war they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them." But I realize now that Jefferson was lying all along, and what he really meant was: "In war they shall kill some of those whose lives we don't much care about anyway, and the troops we command shall destroy all of them."

I'm not saying that killing hundreds of children in some small town in southern Russia is a morally acceptable way to send a message to those in power. Nor am I saying it is not understandable that if some group is systematically killing your sons and daughters and husbands and wives and sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers and lovers and friends that you may want to lash out at members of that larger group. I am saying that there are much longer levers they could have used. If they were trying to send a message to Putin or others of the Russian elite, it probably would not have been a bad idea to strike closer to their home.

How would this play out differently if instead of killing children in Beslan, the Chechens killed Putin's children and the children of others who command Russian soldiers to loot, rape, and kill in Chechnya? What if they skipped the children and went straight after the perpetrators? Would Putin then feel pain? Would that be a more understandable retribution? Would that send a message Putin could understand? Would Putin be so quick to commit more troops to this murderous occupation if he knew that by doing so he was placing his own life and the lives of those nearest to him at risk? Let me put this another way: Do you believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would have been so eager to invade Iraq--oops, to order other people's sons and daughters to invade Iraq--if they themselves would have been in serious danger of being maimed or killed, and if they knew their children would be the first to die?

Not on your life. Not on theirs either.

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 2: Resistance pages 677-678

I have many other problems with the pacifist use of the idea that force is solely the dominion of those in power. It's certainly true that the master uses the tool of violence, but that doesn't mean he owns it. Those in power have effectively convinced us they own land, which is to say they've convinced us to give up our inalienable right to access our own landbases. They've effectively convinced us they own conflict resolution methods (which they call laws), which is to say they've convinced us to give up our inalienable right to resolve our own conflicts (which they call taking the law into your own hands). They've convinced us they own water. They've convinced us they own the wild (the government could not offer "timber sales" unless we all agreed it owned the trees in the first place). They're in the process of convincing us they own the air. The state has for millennia been trying to convince us it owns a monopoly on violence, and abusers have been trying to convince us for far longer than that. Pacifists are more than willing to grant them that, and to shout down anyone who disagrees.

Well, I disagree. Violence does not belong exclusively to those at the top of the hierarchy, no matter how much abusers and their allies try to convince us. They have never convinced wild animals, including wild humans, and they will never convince me.

And who is it who says we should not use the master's tools? Often it is Christians, Buddhists, or other adherents of civilized religions. It is routinely people who wish us to vote our way to justice or shop our way to sustainability. But civilized religions are tools used by the master as surely as is violence. So is voting. So is shopping. If we cannot use tools used by the master, what tools, precisely, can we use? How about writing? No, sorry. As I cited Stanley Diamond much earlier, writing has long been a tool used by the master. So I guess we can't use that. Well, how about discourse in general? Yes, those in power own the means of industrial discourse production, and those in power misuse discourse. Does that mean they own all discourse--all discourse is one of the master's tools--and we can never use it? Of course not. They also own the means of industrial religion production, and they misuse religion. Does that mean they own all religion--all religion is one of the master's tools--and we can never use it? Of course not. They own the means of industrial violence production, and they misuse violence. Does that mean they own all violence--all violence is one of the master's tools--and we can never use it? Of course not.

But I have yet another problem with the statement that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, which is that it's a terrible metaphor. It just doesn't work. The first and most necessary condition for a metaphor is that it make sense in the real world. This doesn't.

You can use a hammer to build a house, and you can use a hammer to take it down.

It doesn't matter whose hammer it is.

...

There's an even bigger problem with the metaphor. What is perhaps its most fundamental premise? That the house belongs to the master. But there is no master, and there is no master's house. There are no master's tools. There is a person who believes himself a master. There is a house he claims is his. There are tools he claims as well. And there are those who still believe he is the master.

But there are others who do not buy into this delusion. There are those of us who see a man, a house, and tools. No more and no less.

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude pages 23-24

Thus the despot subdues his subjects, some of them by means of others, and thus is he protected by those from whom, if they were decent men, he would have to guard himself; just as, in order to split wood, one has to use a wedge of the wood itself. Such are his archers, his guards, his halberdiers; not that they themselves do not suffer occasionally at his hands, but this riff-raff, abandoned alike by God and man, can be led to endure evil if permitted to commit it, not against him who exploits them, but against those who like themselves submit, but are helpless. Nevertheless, observing those men who painfully serve the tyrant in order to win some profit from his tyranny and from the subjection of the populace, I am often overcome with amazement at their wickedness and sometimes by pity for their folly. For, in all honesty, can it be in any way except in folly that you approach a tyrant, withdrawing further from your liberty and, so to speak, embracing with both hands your servitude? Let such men lay aside briefly their ambition, or let them forget for a moment their avarice, and look at themselves as they really are. Then they will realize clearly that the townspeople, the peasants whom they trample under foot and treat worse than convicts or slaves, they will realize, I say, that these people, mistreated as they may be, are nevertheless, in comparison with themselves, better off and fairly free. The tiller of the soil and the artisan, no matter how enslaved, discharge their obligation when they do what they are told to do; but the dictator sees men about him wooing and begging his favor, and doing much more than he tells them to do. Such men must not only obey orders; they must anticipate his wishes; to satisfy him they must foresee his desires; they must wear themselves out, torment themselves, kill themselves with work in his interest, and accept his pleasure as their own, neglecting their preference for his, distorting their character and corrupting their nature; they must pay heed to his words, to his intonation, to his gestures, and to his glance. Let them have no eye, nor foot, nor hand that is not alert to respond to his wishes or to seek out his thoughts.

Can that be called a happy life? Can it be called living? Is there anything more intolerable than that situation, I won't say for a man of mettle nor even for a man of high birth, but simply for a man of common sense or, to go even further, for anyone having the face of a man? What condition is more wretched than to live thus, with nothing to call one's own, receiving from someone else one's sustenance, one's power to act, one's body, one's very life?

Still men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves, or as if anyone could possess under a tyrant a single thing in his own name. Yet they act as if their wealth really belonged to them, and forget that it is they themselves who give the ruler the power to deprive everybody of everything, leaving nothing that anyone can identify as belonging to somebody.

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude page 22

It is not the troops on horseback, it is not the companies afoot, it is not arms that defend the tyrant. This does not seem credible on first thought, but it is nevertheless true that there are only four or five who maintain the dictator, four or five who keep the country in bondage to him. Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, panders to his lusts, and sharers in his plunders. These six manage their chief so successfully that he comes to be held accountable not only for his own misdeeds but even for theirs. The six have six hundred who profit under them, and with the six hundred they do what they have accomplished with their tyrant. The six hundred maintain under them six thousand, whom they promote in rank, upon whom they confer the government of provinces or the direction of finances, in order that they may serve as instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the proper time and working such havoc all around that they could not last except under the shadow of the six hundred, nor be exempt from law and punishment except through their influence.

The consequence of all this is fatal indeed. And whoever is pleased to unwind the skein will observe that not the six thousand but a hundred thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied.

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude page 19

They didn't even neglect, these Roman emperors, to assume generally the title of Tribune of the People, partly because this office was held sacred and inviolable and also because it had been founded for the defense and protection of the people and enjoyed the favor of the state. By this means they made sure that the populace would trust them completely, as if they merely used the title and did not abuse it. Today there are some who do not behave very differently; they never undertake an unjust policy, even one of some importance, without prefacing it with some pretty speech concerning public welfare and common good.

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude pages 17-18

Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They often provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always more readily tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else. The most intelligent and understanding amongst them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, "Long live the King!" The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them. A man might one day be presented with a sesterce and gorge himself at the public feast, lauding Tiberius and Nero for handsome liberality, who on the morrow, would be forced to abandon his property to their avarice, his children to their lust, his very blood to the cruelty of these magnificent emperors, without offering any more resistance than a stone or a tree stump. The mob has always behaved in this way--eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted, and dissolutely callous to degradation and insult that cannot be honorably endured. Nowadays I do not meet anyone who, on hearing mention of Nero, does not shudder at the very name of that hideous monster, that disgusting and vile pestilence. Yet when he died--when this incendiary, this executioner, this savage beast, died as vilely as he had lived--the noble Roman people, mindful of his games and his festivals, were saddened to the point of wearing mourning for him. Thus wrote Cornelius Tacitus, a competent and serious author, and one of the most reliable. This will not be considered peculiar in view of what this same people had previously done at the death of Julius Caesar, who had swept away their laws and their liberty, in whose character, it seems to me, there was nothing worth while, for his very liberality, which is so highly praised, was more baneful than the cruelest tyrant who ever existed, because it was actually this poisonous amiability of his that sweetened servitude for the Roman people. After his death, that people, still preserving on their palates the flavor of his banquets and in their minds the memory of his prodigality, vied with one another to pay him homage. They piled up the seats of the Forum for the great fire that reduced his body to ashes, and later raised a column to him as to "The Father of His People." (Such was the inscription on the capital.) They did him more honor, dead as he was, than they had any right to confer upon any man in the world, except perhaps on those who had killed him.

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude page 6

You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you?

Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude page 3

Our nature is such that the common duties of human relationship occupy a great part of the course of our life. It is reasonable to love virtue, to esteem good deeds, to be grateful for good from whatever source we may receive it, and, often, to give up some of our comfort in order to increase the honor and advantage of some man whom we love and who deserves it. Therefore, if the inhabitants of a country have found some great personage who has shown rare foresight in protecting them in an emergency, rare boldness in defending them, rare solicitude in governing them, and if, from that point on, they contract the habit of obeying him and depending on him to such an extent that they grant him certain prerogatives, I fear that such a procedure is not prudent, inasmuch as they remove him from a position in which he was doing good and advance him to a dignity in which he may do evil.

Robert Sheckley, Immortality, Inc. (in the Dimensions of Sheckley omnibus) pages 127-129

"There are two basic elements in human affairs," Joe said sententiously. "One of them is man's eternal struggle for freedom. Freedom of worship, freedom of press and assembly, freedom to select government--freedom! And the other basic element in human affairs is the efforts of government to withhold freedom from the people."

Blaine considered this a somewhat simplified view of human affairs. But he continued listening.

"Government," Joe said, "withholds freedom for many reasons. For security, for personal profit, for power, or because they feel the people are unready for it. But whatever the reason, the basic facts remain: Man strives for freedom, and government strives to withhold freedom. Transplant is simply one more in a long series of the freedoms that man has aspired to and that his government feels are not good for him...."

"What will Transplant do?" Blaine asked.

"Transplant," Joe said fervently, "gives man the ability to transcend the limits imposed by his heredity and his environment!"

"Huh?"

"Yes! Transplant lets you exchange knowledge, bodies, talents and skills with anyone who wishes to exchange with you. And plenty do.... Think about it, Mr. Blaine. Why should a man be forced to live out his lifetime in a body he had no part in selecting? It's like telling him he must live with the diseases he's inherited, and mustn't try to cure them. Man must have the freedom to choose the body and talents best suited to his personality needs."

"If your plan went through," Blaine said, "you'd simply have a bunch of neurotics changing bodies every day."

"The same general argument was raised against the passage of every freedom," Joe said, his eyes glittering. "Throughout history it was argued that man didn't have the sense to choose his own religion, or that women didn't have the intelligence to use the vote, or that people couldn't be allowed to elect their own representatives because of the stupid choices they'd make. And of course there are plenty of neurotics around, people who'd louse up heaven itself. But you have a much greater number of people who'd use their freedoms well."

Joe lowered his voice to a persuasive whisper. "You must realize, Mr. Blaine, that a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. A man contains all these things, but he is greater than their total. He has the power to change his environment, cure his diseases, advance his skills--and, at last, to choose his body and talents! That is the next freedom, Mr. Blaine! It's historically inevitable, whether you or I or the government like it or not. For man must have every possible freedom!"

Joe finished his fierce and somewhat incoherent oration red-faced and out of breath. Blaine stared at the little man with new respect. He was looking, he realized, at a genuine revolutionary of the year 2110.