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Feral Finster's avatar

"What a blessing it is for rulers that people are sheep." - A. Hitler.

The subject was cats: when Boswell said he didn’t care for them, Rousseau pounced. Men who disliked cats were tyrannical: “They do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do.”

“Nor a hen, either,” Boswell objected. “A hen would obey your orders if you could make her understand them,” the philosopher rejoined, “but a cat will understand you perfectly and not obey them.”

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Vin LoPresti's avatar

Just after reading this post, I read another by Patrick Lawrence in Consortium News, which featured a quote by Bertrand Russell, one that struck me as so appropriate to my recollections of some of the authoritarian droning of my "colleagues" in "higher education", so-called professors who flung standard unmitigated rubbish at students as fact. This ensured that their lecture halls full of indoctrinated-since-the-cradle charges would fail to ever grasp the extent of their own mental prisons. And that grading them would be simple: Just regurgitate my truth for your grade.

Russell's simple statement reveals the embarrassing truth about the US higher educational system that most of us struggle to ignore, but which is complicit in sustaining this Dawn-of-civilization narrative control among our so-called best-educated:

“But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative problems.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/09/patrick-lawrence-dimming-the-lights/

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