Businessmen came to embrace the industrial theology of ‘responsibility,’ and learned a new set of cartelizing catechisms. The campaign to reform trad… - Butler D. Shaffer

Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge ‘our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor’ not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us.

[I]nstitutions are the principle means by which conflict is produced and managed in society. Peace is incompatible with institutional activity. Stated in another way, the success of institutions depends upon the creation of those conditions in which personal and social conflict will flourish.

If, on one occasion, a police officer brutalizes a harmless individual, does that mean that a police-state has arisen? No, but intelligent minds should recognize that such totalitarian consequences are implicit in such an act, and should respond accordingly. I am reminded of that powerful scene at the end of the movie, Judgment at Nuremberg. Judge Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy) has been called to the jail cell of the Nazi judge (played by Burt Lancaster) who has just been given a life sentence for his crimes. The convicted judge tells Judge Haywood: ‘Those people, those millions of people. . . I never knew it would come to that.’ Judge Haywood replies: ‘it ‘came to that’ the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.’