Jack Saturday

Friday, November 13, 2009

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 438-440


That all social violence--whether by war, revolution or economic exploitation--is ultimately a consequence of child abuse should not surprise us. The propensity to reinflict childhood traumas upon others in socially-approved violence is actually far more able to explain and predict the actual outbreak of wars than the usual economic motivations, and we are likely to continue to undergo our periodic sacrificial rituals of war if the infliction of childhood trauma continues. Clear evidence has been published in The Journal of Psychohistory that the more traumatic one's childhood, the more one is likely to be in favor of military solutions to social problems.
The History of Child Abuse
by Lloyd deMause
The Journal of Psychohistory 25 (3) Winter 1998


My friend, John Farina, who is Deputy Director of the University of Toronto's School of Social Work, suggested in his master's thesis that leisure was a synonym for freedom. Leisure, in Aristotle's phrase, is "the state of being free from the necessity of labour" (the italics are mine). But Farina also pointed out that true leisure, as opposed to "free time," presupposed two things: the freedom to choose what one does and the capacity to choose what one does. Without these two prerequisites, true leisure and true freedom are not possible.
Pierre Berton,
The Smug Minority, p. 43

From the beginning, civilization--as well as people's daily lives--has been structured in large part around the concept of work. But now, for the first time in history, human labor is being systematically eliminated from the economic process. In the coming century, employment, as we have come to know it, is likely to be phased out in most of the industrial nations of the world. A new generation of sophisticated information and communication technologies is being introduced into a wide variety of work situations. These machines, together with new forms of business reorganization and management, are forcing millions of blue- and white-collar workers into temporary jobs and unemployment lines-- or worse, breadlines.
Jeremy Rifkin,
Utne Reader,
May-June 1995

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