Those who do not understand the Amish often imagine that their resistance to new technologies arises from a sense of ‘evil’ they see in such tools. B… - Butler D. Shaffer

The benefits of maintaining openness in competition—with no legal restrictions on freedom of entry, product design, or on the terms and conditions for which parties could contract with one another—have long been rejected by major business organizations more concerned with the survival of individual firms and industries. The phrases ‘laissez-faire’ and ‘invisible hand’ that once articulated an awareness of the conditions under which prosperity might prevail, have been replaced by the dogma ‘too big to fail,’ that have allowed modern governments to ‘bail out’ failing firms with gifts of hundreds of billions of dollars!

The pyramid expresses the essence of a world premised on vertical power, in which interpersonal relationships are yoked together in systems of domination and subservience. No more poignant image of a top-down world—one in which institutional violence operates as a kind of ersatz gravitational force—exists than this. Members of the institutional hierarchy—who long ago learned that they could more readily benefit by coercing their fellow humans than by trading with them—have seen to it that others be inculcated in a belief in the necessity of pyramidalism. Our entire institutionalized world—from the more violent political organizations to more temperate ideologies—is premised on the shared assumption that only in vertically-structured institutionalized authority can mankind find conditions of peace, liberty, and order.

One cannot be devoutly religious, or patriotic, or moral, without differentiating oneself from the ungodly, the disloyal, or the immoral. To be for one’s own group, or nation, or race requires that one be against strangers.