Know Thyself - Welcome @ Kristo's blog

Know Thyself - Welcome @ Kristo's blog
David - I adore the community of saints / Gelukpa's

woensdag 22 augustus 2018

Humans, govern thyselves ... You can do it !

"There is only one offense against authority: self-control; and only one obeisance to it: submission to control by authority.
The person who controls himself and cares for his own well being has no need of an external authority to protect him from himself. He is his own self-protector.
This renders paternalistic authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others in the name of protecting them? He could mind his own business. But that is a fatuous answer.
Persons satisfied with minding their own business do not aspire to become paternalistic authorities, while persons who become such authorities consider minding other peoples' business their own business and call it "caring' and "assuming responsibility."
Authority needs persons who lack autonomy or whom they can readily deprive of it, such as children, old people, and patients. Hence the ceaseless warfare of authority against autonomy, against suicide,
against masturbation, against self-medication, against the proper use of language itself."

Professor Dr. Thomas Szasz, Words to the Wise


"I venture to say that, properly understood, libertarianism is as much about responsibility as it is about liberty.
Famously, Edmund Burke remarked: "Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere,
and the less there is within, the more there must be without. Lord Acton rearticulated this "law of self-government" in slightly different terms: " Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being.
In proportion as we control our behavior and abstain from violating the rights of others, we are entitled to enjoy the fruits of liberty."
With respect to psychiatry, the challenge to liberations is not to be blinded by the slogan, "it works", in certain aspects of life -
in religion, politics, and psychiatry - everything works, and nothing works. The value of libertarianism as an ethic is not that "it works" but that it promotes liberty and responsability.
Stupidity does not work. Laziness does not work. Poor personal hygiene does not work.
But we, libertarians, oppose agents of the state interfering in the lives of persons on such grounds. We do so because we value freedom."


"Generally speaking, a libertarian is one who wants to be governed far less than he is today."


Professor Dr. Thomas Szasz, Faith in Freedom

The insane were also a new class, a product of replacing a theological with a medical perspective on dissent and deviance. Both indigence and insanity are thus the products of modernity, specifically, of individualism and of the new political relationship between the individual and the state.

Professor Dr. Thomas Szasz, Cruel Compassion, Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

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