Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1521-1523

But of what value is the opinion, say upon socialism or the federal reserve system, of an economist whose job depends upon the good will of a board of trustees made up of bankers and manufacturers? And of what value is that of an editorial writer whose boss is a speculator on the stock exchange? Here, obviously, the freedom of the expert is quite as important as his honesty, or even his competence. If he is not free, then he is scarcely worth hearing, however ingeniously he may argue his case.
Henry Louis Mencken
[emphasis JS]

 What Milgram and Zimbardo show us with their experiments is that when human beings participate in social organizations, they become, at least to some extent, automatons of the larger social system. That is to say, what exactly happens to people as they shift into a "functional position " in a social hierarchy?
First, there is a critical shift in the actor's attitude: they no longer see themselves as acting on their own purposes, but they are acting as an agent for executing the wishes of another person. The agentic state is a condition in which a person sees themselves as the agent of another. It is used to describe the mental state which is the opposite of autonomy- when a person sees himself as acting on his own. This critical shift in attitude occurs in situations that are defined by a bureaucratic hierarchy which has its own special form of authority.
George Baldwin
[emphasis JS]

 If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for them it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you've given it away you'd ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and the stripes forever? You're goddamn right they didn't. They died crying in their minds like little babies. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.
Dalton Trumbo