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The middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor distrusted it as a sham equality of votes nullified by a gaping inequality of wealth. The rising bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided when Philip of Macedon pounced down upon it in 338 B.C., and many rich Greeks welcomed his coming as preferable to revolution. Athenian democracy disappeared under Macedonian dictatorship.
political evolution to a sequence of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and dictatorship
mobile money replaced land as the source or instrument of political power; rival factions competed in the wholesale purchase of candidates and votes; in 53 B.C. one group of voters received ten million sesterces for its support.62 When money failed, murder was available: citizens who had voted the wrong way were in some instances beaten close to death and their houses were set on fire. Antiquity had never known so rich, so powerful, and so corrupt a government.63 The aristocrats engaged Pompey to maintain their ascendancy; the commoners cast in their lot with Caesar; ordeal of battle replaced
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A government that governed least was admirably suited to liberate those individualistic energies that transformed America from a wilderness to a material utopia, and from the child and ward to the rival and guardian of Western Europe.
Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability, and intensifies the concentration of wealth, responsibility, and political power.
Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple.
though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal.
A right is not a gift of God or nature but a privilege which it is good for the group that the individual should have.
If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship
will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all;
The individual submits to restraints laid upon him by morals and laws, and agrees to replace combat with conference, because the state
guarantees him basic protection in his life, property, and legal rights. The state itself acknowledges no substantial restraints, either because it is strong enough to defy any interference with its will or because there is no superstate to offer it basic protection, and no international law or moral code wielding effective force.
new governors, eager to control the resources and manhood of their states, are a likely prey to Communist propaganda, infiltration, and subversion. Unless this spreading process is halted it is only a matter of time before nearly all Asia, Africa, and South America will be under Communist leadership,
Imagine an American President saying to the leaders of China and Russia:
Let us open our doors to each other, and organize cultural exchanges that will promote mutual appreciation and understanding.
The general smiles. “You have forgotten all the lessons of history,” he says, “and all that nature of man which you described.
we may make contact with ambitious species on other planets or stars; soon thereafter there will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we of this earth be one.”
We have defined civilization as “social order promoting cultural creation.”
In organic periods men are busy building; in critical periods they are busy destroying.
On one point all are agreed: civilizations begin, flourish, decline, and disappear—or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving streams. What are the causes of development, and what are the causes of decay?
whether a challenge will or will not be met, the answer is that this depends upon the presence or absence of initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will (which is almost a definition of genius), capable of effective responses to new situations (which is almost a definition of intelligence).
When the group or a civilization declines, it is through no mystic limitation of a corporate life, but
through the failure of its political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change.
As it is with companies
Rome imported Greek civilization and transmitted it to Western Europe; America profited from European civilization and prepares to pass it on, with a technique of transmission never equaled before.
Since we have admitted no substantial change in man’s nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends—the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other (or by the same), the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars.
We shall here define progress as the increasing control of the environment by life.
we must understand that each age and place needs and elicits some types of ability rather than others in its pursuit of environmental control.
