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"The most obvious, irreconcilable difference between Obso-model and Novo-model societies is that, in an Obso-model society, a social structure controls social processes while, in a Novo-model society, social processes determine social structures."
"Human potentiality is not something that is distributed equally among all individuals. Like many other human characteristics, it is apparently subject to a natural or normal distribution. And people with the least human potentiality naturally tend to doubt the existence of any such thing because their lack of it might imply deficiency."
"There was nothing mysterious about the social benefit of trading. A voluntary transaction does not happen unless both parties expect to receive some personal benefit from it. And if everyone trades with everyone else, those personal benefits multiply accordingly, throughout a community."
"Nothing would have seemed more pathetic to citizens of Novoasis than a person who tried to explain or justify his existence in purely materialistic terms – just as nothing would have seemed more foolish or dangerous than someone who tried to apply moral principles to purely materialistic issues."
"If the members of a community lost sight of their central purpose, even the most innovative organizations could fall victim to the kind of catamorphosis that causes the degeneration of constructive adventures into consumptive institutions, and institutions into museums, on the way to social stagnation and disintegration."
"As a group, they would never have entrusted government with any task that required competence greater than that of their least competent member. And they would never have entrusted government with any powers that could not have been safely entrusted to their least trustworthy member."
"Those are the people who believe that the greatest injury one person can do to others, short of murder, is to do something those other people are unable to do, or are afraid to do, because that might embarrass and diminish them by making them look or feel incompetent or cowardly."
"A young man who is moving "upward" in an imaginary, obnoxious society is actually moving downward in the real world. And the bad human consequences of abandoning morality and integrity in the real world usually prevail over delusions of social advancement in any imaginary world."
"Mad mobs have also been known to destroy whole economies and societies when ownerless factions feel free to use mindless violence – or just the threat of such violence – whenever it seems to serve their members' individual or collective personal purposes."
"The purpose of prehistoric spiritualism was to support good families as the essential building blocks of good, bottom-up communities and societies. Institutional religion, on the other hand, was a top-down instrument of oppression and social control that served as a stabilizing influence in obnoxious ancient societies, and still serves the same purpose in many of their modern descendants."
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