When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery. - Gerry Spence

Every triumph is preceded by fear. Fear always initiates the act of breaking free. And why? What is the biological advantage of a trapped psyche? Breaking out, walking freely through the forest, leaving old trails for new ones always entails a certain quantum of risk. Might we not come face to face with the lurking enemy? Might we fail to measure up? Might we not be injured or killed? But both the forest and the enemy are within. Life entails risk. If it were otherwise, one could not bear to live it, for the risks of boredom, of being trapped within the self — the chick dying in the egg — of dying without having lived, are risks far greater than any that lurk in the forest.

Early on de Tocqueville correctly observed that this democracy was one in which “men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, ’til each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals.…” (my italics).

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.