“
Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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The reason we are so controlled is not that we don't have the power to decide our own destiny, it is that we give that power away every minute of our lives. When something happens that we don't like, we look for someone else to blame. When there is a problem in the world, we say "What are they going to do about it". At which point they, who have secretly created the problem in the first place, respond to this demand by introducing a 'solution' - more centralisation of power and erosion of freedom. If you want to give more powers to the police, security agencies and military, and you want the public to demand you do it, then ensure there is more crime, violence and terrorism, and then it's a cinch to achieve your aims. Once the people are in fear of being burgled, mugged or bombed, they will demand that you take their freedom away to protect them from what they have been manipulated to fear. The Oklahoma bombing is a classic of this kind, as I detail in ..And The Truth Shall Set You Free. I call this technique problem-reaction-solution.
Create the problem, encourage the reaction "something must be done", and then offer the solution. It is summed up by the Freemason motto 'Ordo Ab Chao' -order out of chaos. Create the chaos and then offer the way to restore order. Your order. The masses are herded and directed by many and varios forms of emotional and mental control. It is the only way it coud be done.
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David Icke
“
Democracy was shunned by Mobutu, who defied calls for free and fair elections and centralised power into the hands of a close-knit cabal of friends, family and cronies.
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Tim Butcher (Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart)
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Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
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George Orwell (Animal Farm)
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The feminist project is basically an anarchist movement which does not want to replace one (male) power elite by another (female) power elite, but which wants to build up a non-hierarchical, non-centralised society where no elite lives of exploitation and dominance over others.
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Maria Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour)
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Ordinary cruelty is simple stupidity. It comes from the entire want of imagination. It is the result in our days of stereotyped systems, of hard-and-fast rules, of centralisation, of officialism, and of irresponsible authority. Whenever there is centralisation there is stupidity. What is inhuman in modern life is officialism. Authority is as destructive to those who exercise it as it is to those on whom it is exercised.
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Oscar Wilde (Complete Works of Oscar Wilde)
“
whatever it is, decentralisation is the key of progress for human/country/society. centralisation will always disruptive in long term.
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kurbhatt
“
Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at lenght, and with deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can be hardly expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized.But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralisation of power.
As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive - and so less available to the eterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has grobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State - that is to say, by small group of party leaders and soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders.
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Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)
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What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is in the hands of private individuals never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralised as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.
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Friedrich A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom)
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if we have the choice between trusting in centralised power to make the right decision in that matter, or trusting in free associations of libertarian communities to make that decision, I would rather trust the latter. And the reason is that I think that they can serve to maximise decent human instincts, whereas a system of centralised power will tend in a general way to maximise one of the worst of human instincts, namely the instinct of rapaciousness, of destructiveness, of accumulating power to oneself and destroying others.
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Noam Chomsky (Human Nature: Justice Versus Power: The Chomsky-Foucault Debate)
“
Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing,
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
Wikipedia suggests a theory called ‘general systems collapse’, whereby ‘centralisation, specialisation, complexity, and top-heavy political structure’ made Late Bronze Age civilisation particularly vulnerable to breakdown. Another of the theories is headlined simply: ‘Climate change’. I think this puts our present civilisation in a kind of ominous light, don’t you?
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Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
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French rule brought a whole series of innovations in the way the Kingdom was run. Out went feudalism, and in came private property. Out went a messy assemblage of local customs, baronial and church jurisdictions, and public ordinances: in came a new code of civil law and the beginnings of a police force. The southern part of the Italian peninsula began to resemble a modern, centralised state.
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John Dickie (Blood Brotherhoods: A History of Italy's Three Mafias)
“
Christian missions to India imply that India is a land of heathens, and, therefore, stands on the same level with the Andaman or the Fiji Islands. That a country which has been recognised in all ages the world over as the mother of all religions and the cradle of civilisation should be considered as pagan, shows how much ignorance prevails in Christendom.
Since the Parliament of Religions, I have been studying Christian institutions, and I have also studied the way in which the Christian ministers and the missionaries are manufactured in this country, and have learned to pity them. We must not blame them too severely, because their education is too narrow to make them broad-minded. I grant that they are good-hearted, that they are good husbands and often fathers of large families, but generally they are very ignorant, especially of the history of civilisation and of the philosophy of religion of India. Most of them do not even know the history of ancient India.
We know that in this age of competition, centralisation, and monopoly, very many people are forced out of business. The English say, 'The fool of the family goes into the Church'; so that when a youth is unable to make a living, he takes to missionary work, goes to India, and helps to introduce among the Hindus the doctrines of his church, which have long since been exploded by science.
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Virchand Gandhi (The Monist)
“
Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, you can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but you won’t get an Apple or a Wikipedia.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
Custine described them as ‘automata inconvenienced with a soul’: a description true, perhaps, of all bureaucrats fearful for their jobs but truest of all where power is both arbitrary and completely centralised, as it was in Russia.
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Theodore Dalrymple (Our Culture, What's Left Of It)
“
What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government.
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George Orwell (1984)
“
When there is a problem in the world, we say "What are they going to do about it". At which point they, who have secretly created the problem in the first place, respond to this demand by introducing a 'solution' - more centralisation of power and erosion of freedom. If you want to give more powers to the police, security agencies and military, and you want the public to demand you do it, then ensure there is more crime, violence and terrorism, and then it's a cinch to achieve your aims. Once the people are in fear of being burgled, mugged or bombed, they will demand that you take their freedom away to protect them from what they have been manipulated to fear….Create the problem, encourage the reaction "something must be done", and then offer the solution. It is summed up by the Freemason motto 'Ordo Ab Chao' -order out of chaos. Create the chaos and then offer the way to restore order. Your order. The masses are herded and directed by many and various forms of emotional and mental control.
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David Icke
“
to secure as much of the advantages of centralised power and intelligence, as can be had without turning into governmental channels too great a proportion of the general activity, is one of the most difficult and complicated questions in the art of government.
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John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)
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Despite what academics, NGOs and expatriate technicians seem to think, the problem is not the women. It is the stoves: developers have consistently prioritised technical parameters such as fuel efficiency over the needs of the stove user, frequently leading users to reject them, explains Crewe. 49 And although the low adoption rate is a problem going back decades, development agencies have yet to crack the problem, 50 for the very simple reason that they still haven’t got the hang of consulting women and then designing a product rather than enforcing a centralised design on them from above.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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From the perspective of today, or from that of a Cobden-Mill-Smith liberal, there is not a great deal of difference between the various -isms of the twentieth century. Communism, fascism, nationalism, corporatism, protectionism, Taylorism, dirigisme – they are all centralising systems with planning at their heart.
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Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
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Money is not energy. Wars would also arise as competing political forces saw opportunities to advance, but military expenditure would simply draw more energy and funds away from maintaining social systems and infrastructure, generally leading to the fragmentation or breakdown of centralised systems of administration, governance, and rule.
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Samuel Alexander (Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation)
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Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes.
”
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
To a watching world,” wrote The Guardian, “the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralised coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth.
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Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
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The Rajapaksa regime in Sri Lanka, knows exactly how the political bluff works and uses it to spread lies among the people. What he has done to this country is assassinate the dignity and respect of good citizens while centralising everything into himself and his family members. His ego may lead him to think that it will last forever so to keep his dream alive he will not hesitate to eliminate the person who questions this.
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Nilantha Ilangamuwa
“
Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
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Je n’aime pas beaucoup énoncer des généralités mais, pour une fois, et je vous demande de m’excuser, je prétends qu’au Japon il est sûr et certain que si l’on n’agit pas tout à fait normalement, si l’on se comporte différemment des autres, on attire sur soi un flot de réactions négatives. Le Japon (que ce soit un bien ou un mal) est un pays qui pose l’harmonie comme valeur suprême : on ne doit pas causer de troubles. Il y a aussi une tendance forte à centraliser la culture à l’extrême.
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Haruki Murakami (Profession romancier)
“
Oui, partout, oui, toujours, oui, pour combattre les violences et les impostures, oui pour réhabiliter les lapidés et les accablés, oui, pour conclure logiquement et marcher droit, oui, pour consoler, pour secourir, pour relever, pour encourager, pour enseigner, oui, pour panser en attendant qu'on guérisse, oui, pour transformer la charité en fraternité, l'aumône en assistance, la fainéantise en travail, l'oisiveté en utilité, la centralisation en famille, l'iniquité en justice, le bourgeois en citoyen, la populace en peuple, la canaille en nation, les nations en humanité, la guerre en amour, le préjugé en examen, les frontières en soudures, les limites en ouvertures, les ornières en rails, les sacristies en temples, l'instinct du mal en volonté du bien, la vie en droit, les rois en hommes, oui, pour ôter des religions l'enfer et des sociétés le bagne, oui, pour être frère du misérable, du serf, du fellah, du prolétaire, du déshérité, de l'exploité, du trahi, du vaincu, du vendu, de l'enchaîné, du sacrifié, de la prostituée, du forçat, de l'ignorant, du sauvage, de l'esclave, du nègre, du condamné et du damné, oui, nous sommes tes fils, Révolution !
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Victor Hugo (Shakespeare : une vie de génie et d'amertume (French Edition))
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Oui, partout, oui, toujours, oui, pour combattre les violences et les impostures, oui, pour réhabiliter les lapidés et les accablés, oui, pour conclure logiquement et marcher droit, oui, pour consoler, pour secourir, pour relever, pour encourager, pour enseigner, oui, pour panser en attendant qu'on guérisse, oui, pour transformer la charité en fraternité, l'aumône en assistance, la fainéantise en travail, l'oisiveté en utilité, la centralisation en famille, l'iniquité en justice, le bourgeois en citoyen, la populace en peuple, la canaille en nation, les nations en humanité, la guerre en amour, le préjugé en examen, les frontières en soudures, les limites en ouvertures, les ornières en rails, les sacristies en temples, l'instinct du mal en volonté du bien, la vie en droit, les rois en hommes, oui, pour ôter des religions l'enfer et des sociétés le bagne, oui, pour être frère du misérable, du serf, du fellah, du prolétaire, du déshérité, de l'exploité, du trahi, du vaincu, du vendu, de l'enchaîné, du sacrifié, de la prostituée, du forçat, de l'ignorant, du sauvage, de l'esclave, du nègre, du condamné et du damné, oui, nous sommes tes fils, Révolution !
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Victor Hugo (Shakespeare : une vie de génie et d'amertume (French Edition))
“
Oui, partout, oui, toujours, oui, pour combattre les violences et les impostures, oui pour réhabiliter les lapidés et les accablés, oui, pour conclure logiquement et marcher droit, oui, pour consoler, pour secourir, pour relever, pour encourager, pour enseigner, oui, pour panser en attendant qu'on guérisse, oui, pour transformer la charité en fraternité, l'aumône en assistance, la fainéantise en travail, l'oisiveté en utilité, la centralisation en famille, l'iniquité en justice, le bourgeois en citoyen, la populace en peuple, la canaille en nation, les nations en humanité, la guerre en amour, le préjugé en examen, les frontières en soudures, les limites en ouvertures, les ornières en rails, les sacristies en temples, l'instinct du mal en volonté du bien, la vie en droit, les rois en hommes, oui, pour ôter des religions l'enfer et des sociétés le bagne, oui, pour être frère du misérable, du serf, du fellah, du prolétaire, du déshérité, de l'ex- ploité, du trahi, du vaincu, du vendu, de l'enchaîné, du sacrifié, de la prostituée, du forçat, de l'ignorant, du sauvage, de l'esclave, du nègre, du condamné et du damné, oui, nous sommes tes fils, Révolution!
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”
Victor Hugo
“
Oui, partout, oui, toujours, oui, pour combattre les violences et les impostures, oui pour réhabiliter les lapidés et les accablés, oui, pour conclure logiquement et marcher droit, oui, pour consoler, pour secourir, pour relever, pour encourager, pour enseigner, oui, pour panser en attendant qu'on guérisse, oui, pour transformer la charité en fraternité, l'aumône en assistance, la fainéantise en travail, l'oisiveté en utilité, la centralisation en famille, l'iniquité en justice, le bourgeois en citoyen, la populace en peuple, la canaille en nation, les nations en humanité, la guerre en amour, le préjugé en examen, les frontières en soudures, les limites en ouvertures, les ornières en rails, les sacristies en temples, l'instinct du mal en volonté du bien, la vie en droit, les rois en hommes, oui, pour ôter des religions l'enfer et des sociétés le bagne, oui, pour être frère du misérable, du serf, du fellah, du prolétaire, du déshérité, de l'ex- ploité, du trahi, du vaincu, du vendu, de l'enchaîné, du sacrifié, de la prostituée, du forçat, de l'ignorant, du sauvage, de l'esclave, du nègre, du condamné et du damné, oui, nous sommes tes fils, Révolution !
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Victor Hugo (Shakespeare : une vie de génie et d'amertume (French Edition))
“
As the number of deaths climbed to the highest in the world, America—and those looking to it for leadership—had to come to terms with the untested fragilities of its social ecosystem. “To a watching world,” wrote The Guardian, “the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralised coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth.
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Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
“
The fascist story explained history as a struggle among different nations, and envisioned a world dominated by one human group that violently subdues all others. The communist story explained history as a struggle among different classes, and envisioned a world in which all groups are united by a centralised social system that ensures equality even at the price of freedom. The liberal story explained history as a struggle between liberty and tyranny, and envisioned a world in which all humans cooperate freely and peacefully, with minimum central control even at the price of some inequality.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
Finally, it was now widely recognised that Marx’s own theory, insofar as he formulated it in a systematic manner, lacked homogeneity in at least one important respect. Thus, it might be held that it consisted both of an analysis of capitalism and its tendencies, and simultaneously of a historic hope, expressed with enormous prophetic passion and in terms of a philosophy derived from Hegel, of the perennial human desire for a perfect society, which is to be achieved through the proletariat. In Marx’s own intellectual development, the second of these preceded the first, and cannot be intellectually derived from it. In other words there is a qualitative difference between e.g. the proposition that capitalism by its nature generates insuperable contradictions which must inevitably produce the conditions of its supersession as soon as ‘centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with capitalist development’, and the proposition that the post-capitalist society will lead to the end of human alienation and the full development of all individuals’ human faculties. They belong to different forms of discourse, though both may eventually prove to be true.
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Eric J. Hobsbawm (How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism)
“
While the Habsburgs of Austria, the Bourbons of France, the Tudors of England, and every other ruling house of Europe strove to impose centralised government, ideological unity and increasing control of the individual through a growing administration, Poland alone of all the major states took the opposite course. The Poles had made an article of faith of the principle that all government is undesirable, and strong government is strongly undesirable. This was based on the conviction that one man had no right to tell another what to do, and that the quality of life was impaired by unnecessary administrative superstructure.
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Adam Zamoyski (Poland: A History)
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Countries measured their success by the size of their territory, the increase in their population and the growth of their GDP – not by the happiness of their citizens. Industrialised nations such as Germany, France and Japan established gigantic systems of education, health and welfare, yet these systems were aimed to strengthen the nation rather than ensure individual well-being. Schools were founded to produce skilful and obedient citizens who would serve the nation loyally. At eighteen, youths needed to be not only patriotic but also literate, so that they could read the brigadier’s order of the day and draw up tomorrow’s battle plans. They had to know mathematics in order to calculate the shell’s trajectory or crack the enemy’s secret code. They needed a reasonable command of electrics, mechanics and medicine in order to operate wireless sets, drive tanks and take care of wounded comrades. When they left the army they were expected to serve the nation as clerks, teachers and engineers, building a modern economy and paying lots of taxes. The same went for the health system. At the end of the nineteenth century countries such as France, Germany and Japan began providing free health care for the masses. They financed vaccinations for infants, balanced diets for children and physical education for teenagers. They drained festering swamps, exterminated mosquitoes and built centralised sewage systems. The aim wasn’t to make people happy, but to make the nation stronger. The country needed sturdy soldiers and workers, healthy women who would give birth to more soldiers and workers, and bureaucrats who came to the office punctually at 8 a.m. instead of lying sick at home. Even the welfare system was originally planned in the interest of the nation rather than of needy individuals. When Otto von Bismarck pioneered state pensions and social security in late nineteenth-century Germany, his chief aim was to ensure the loyalty of the citizens rather than to increase their well-being. You fought for your country when you were eighteen, and paid your taxes when you were forty, because you counted on the state to take care of you when you were seventy.30 In 1776 the Founding Fathers of the United States established the right to the pursuit of happiness as one of three unalienable human rights, alongside the right to life and the right to liberty. It’s important to note, however, that the American Declaration of Independence guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness itself. Crucially, Thomas Jefferson did not make the state responsible for its citizens’ happiness. Rather, he sought only to limit the power of the state.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
The larger Europe grows, the more diverse must be the forms of co-operation it requires. Instead of a centralised bureaucracy, the model should be a market — not only a market of individuals and companies, but also a market in which the players are governments.
Thus governments would compete with each other for foreign investments, top management and high earners through lower taxes and less regulation.
Such a market would impose a fiscal discipline on governments because they would not want to drive away expertise and business.
It would also help to establish which fiscal and regulatory policies produced the best overall economic results.
No wonder socialists don't like it.
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Margaret Thatcher
“
In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
“However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
The figures for 2002 are even more surprising. Out of 57 million dead, only 172,000 people died in war and 569,000 died of violent crime (a total of 741,000 victims of human violence). In contrast, 873,000 people committed suicide.5 It turns out that in the year following the 9/11 attacks, despite all the talk of terrorism and war, the average person was more likely to kill himself than to be killed by a terrorist, a soldier or a drug dealer.
In the decentralised kingdoms of medieval Europe, about twenty to forty people were murdered each year for every 100,000 inhabitants. In recent decades, when states and markets have become all-powerful and communities have vanished, violence rates have dropped even further. Today the global average is only nine murders a year per 100,000 people, and most of these murders take place in weak states such as Somalia and Colombia. In the centralised states of Europe, the average is one murder a year per 100,000 people.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group and nation has its own tales and myths. But during the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story and the liberal story. The fascist story explained history as a struggle among different nations, and envisioned a world dominated by one human group that violently subdues all others. The communist story explained history as a struggle among different classes, and envisioned a world in which all groups are united by a centralised social system that ensures equality even at the price of freedom. The liberal story explained history as a struggle between liberty and tyranny, and envisioned a world in which all humans cooperate freely and peacefully, with minimum central control even at the price of some inequality. (page 11)
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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In Spain an exceptionally favourable situation, more favourable than in Russia before the October 1917 revolution, there was no party or leadership capable of making a correct estimate of the situation, drawing the necessary conclusions, and the workers firmly to take power. All that was necessary in the situation was to explain to the workers the real relationship of forces, the necessary and vital steps and to show them how their leaders and organisations stood in the way.
Power was in the hands of the workers, but it was not centralised or organised. Committees, Juntas or Soviets, the name does not matter, should have been organised in every factory and district, elected by the workers, housewives and all sections of the working population, including the peasants and of course the workers’ militias. These in turn should have been linked by delegates to form area, regional and an all national committee. This could have formed the framework of a new regime pushing aside the contemptible and powerless government and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
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Ted Grant
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... People like to know what they are getting ahead of time. Thus, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, F.W. Woolworth: store-brands maintained and visible across the entire country. Wherever you go, you will get something that is, with small regional variations, the same.
'In the field of funeral homes, however, things are, perforce, different. You need to feel that you are getting small-town personal service from someone who has a calling to the profession. You want personal attention to you and your loved one in a time of great loss. You wish to know that your grief is happening on a local level, not a national one. But in all branches of industry - and death is an industry, my young friend, make no mistake about that - one makes one's money from operating in bulk, from buying in quantity, from centralising one's operations. It's not pretty, but it's true. Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are travelling in a cooler van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty, fifty, or a hundred cadavers to go...
'So when big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King.
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Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
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According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing. Capitalism processes data by directly connecting all producers and consumers to one another, and allowing them to exchange information freely and make decisions independently. For example, how do you determine the price of bread in a free market? Well, every bakery may produce as much bread as it likes, and charge for it as much as it wants. The customers are equally free to buy as much bread as they can afford, or take their business to the competitor. It isn’t illegal to charge $1,000 for a baguette, but nobody is likely to buy it.
On a much grander scale, if investors predict increased demand for bread, they will buy shares of biotech firms that genetically engineer more prolific wheat strains. The inflow of capital will enable the firms to speed up their research, thereby providing more wheat faster, and averting bread shortages. Even if one biotech giant adopts a flawed theory and reaches an impasse, its more successful competitors will achieve the hoped-for breakthrough. Free-market capitalism thus distributes the work of analysing data and making decisions between many independent but interconnected processors. As the Austrian economics guru Friedrich Hayek explained, ‘In a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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This extreme situation in which all data is processed and all decisions are made by a single central processor is called communism. In a communist economy, people allegedly work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs. In other words, the government takes 100 per cent of your profits, decides what you need and then supplies these needs. Though no country ever realised this scheme in its extreme form, the Soviet Union and its satellites came as close as they could. They abandoned the principle of distributed data processing, and switched to a model of centralised data processing. All information from throughout the Soviet Union flowed to a single location in Moscow, where all the important decisions were made. Producers and consumers could not communicate directly, and had to obey government orders.
For instance, the Soviet economics ministry might decide that the price of bread in all shops should be exactly two roubles and four kopeks, that a particular kolkhoz in the Odessa oblast should switch from growing wheat to raising chickens, and that the Red October bakery in Moscow should produce 3.5 million loaves of bread per day, and not a single loaf more. Meanwhile the Soviet science ministry forced all Soviet biotech laboratories to adopt the theories of Trofim Lysenko – the infamous head of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rejected the dominant genetic theories of his day. He insisted that if an organism acquired some new trait during its lifetime, this quality could pass directly to its descendants. This idea flew in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy, but it dovetailed nicely with communist educational principles. It implied that if you could train wheat plants to withstand cold weather, their progenies will also be cold-resistant. Lysenko accordingly sent billions of counter-revolutionary wheat plants to be re-educated in Siberia – and the Soviet Union was soon forced to import more and more flour from the United States.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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Indira Gandhi left behind several legacies—dynastic rule, economic control through populism—such as, bank nationalisation, Garibi Hatao and the 20-point programme—but most importantly, she left behind a centralised institutionalisation of political corruption that has matured into another Frankenstein, devouring the nation and the poor of India.
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Ram Jethmalani (RAM JETHMALANI MAVERICK UNCHANGED, UNREPENTANT)
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(19) Signalling promotes the centralisation of authority.
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Andrew Gordon (Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command)
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By the state I mean centralised political authority, usually a king, supported by tribute and taxes, and with a monopoly of armed force. Although it has been estimated that only about 20% of tribal societies in Africa, the Americas, Polynesia, New Guinea, and many parts of Asia actually developed the state, the state was almost as important a revolution in human history as agriculture itself, because of all the further developments it made possible, and a large literature on the process of state formation has developed
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C.R. Hallpike (Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society)
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Nazarbayev found that he and his regime had a certain chemistry with figures from Blair’s strand of Western politics: the Third Way. It was a system that purported to wed the humanity of the left to the dynamism of the markets. Its proponents possessed, as Tony Judt put it following Blair’s election, ‘blissful confidence in the dismantling of centralised public services and social safety nets’. They felt themselves to be part of a new, transnational elite that would harness the miracles of globalisation. Peter Mandelson, Blair’s strategist, announced the end of the left’s anxieties about the hoarding of wealth. ‘We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,’ he said. (He added, ‘as long as they pay their taxes’, though the caveat was often forgotten, perhaps because they did not.)
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Tom Burgis (Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World)
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opposite of saint is Satan,
Opposite of divine is diabolic,
Opposite of pure is profane
But finding the opposite of God is insane
It's at the centre of all creation
Get centralised... get #Mickeymized!
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Dr Mickey Mehta
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In defying her placement as an ownable body, the cow's resistance interrupted her object status and placement within animal agribusiness. Her fight for freedom transgressed the human spatial ordering of the Union Stockyard era, when slaughterhouses were centralised in urban areas, and demonstrated her strong will to live.
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Sarat Colling (Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era (The Animal Turn))
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The only large, centralised, developed state with a Mediterranean coastline was Egypt.
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Roderick Beaton (The Greeks: A Global History)
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Russia, Catherine asserted, is too big and too unruly ever to be suited to democracy; only the strong hand of centralised autocracy can keep such a disparate, centripetal empire together and maintain order among her people.
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Mikhail Khodorkovsky (The Russia Conundrum: How the West Fell for Putin's Power Gambit--and How to Fix It)
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Hayek believed that most people overestimated the value of centralised knowledge, and tended to overlook ‘knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place’.
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Tim Harford (Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure)
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Pour ma part, je ne saurais concevoir qu’une nation puisse vivre ni surtout prospérer sans une forte centralisation gouvernementale. Mais je pense que la centralisation administrative n’est propre qu’à énerver les peuples qui s’y soumettent, parce qu’elle tend sans cesse à diminuer parmi eux l’esprit de cité.
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Alexis de Tocqueville (De la démocratie en Amérique (02 volumes) (French Edition))
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Their government is centralised, and so long as every member of the ruling party remains uncorrupt and lives up to their ideals I think they have every chance of success.
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Jean Lucey Pratt (A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt)
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The Indian federal system is based on the ‘Canadian model’ and not on the ‘American model’. The ‘Canadian model’ differs fundamentally from the ‘American model’ in so far as it establishes a very strong centre. The Indian federation resembles the Candian federation (i) in its formation (i.e., by way of disintegration); (ii) in its preference to the term ‘Union’ (the Canadian federation is also called a ‘Union’); and (iii) in its centralising tendency (i.e., vesting more powers in the centre vis-a-vis the states).
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M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
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a century-long suction of power to the capital has turned Britain into an extraordinarily centralised country. Ninety-five per cent of taxes are raised in London,
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Anonymous
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The euro crisis showed that the euro zone needs a banking union, which centralises a lot of power. And the best hope of growth lies in expanding the single market. The next commission needs to remove blockages to trade in services, energy and the digital economy. More free-trade deals, starting with America, are another priority. Opening up Europe’s economy will annoy some voters (and scare some politicians); but the alternative—years of economic stagnation—will doom the project anyway.
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Anonymous
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The structure of this new religion is similar to that of traditional religions, as WHO is similar to the Catholic Church. 6 Both are highly bureaucratic, hierarchical and lack transparency; they are centralised and possess a worldwide network of local departments. To maintain their integrity, both organise synods and congresses guarded by special associations. Both are ruled by their own juridical systems and claim monopoly over its services. And just as before the Reformation laymen were not supposed to communicate with God without an expert as a mediator, individuals today should avoid self-treatment and should follow their medical leaders. For this reason, Szasz
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Anonymous
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However, once safety produces enough prosperity, or as he puts it ‘stored energy’,[26] the civilisational process centralises and gives way to a different type of spirit marked by money-making, usury, and, above all, greed. This increased centralisation exhausts energy rather than accumulates it, and once that energy is all used up, the husk that is left can no longer sustain the civilisation and so collapse and a return to barbarism beckons.
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Neema Parvini (The Prophets of Doom)
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What perhaps began as a consensual, communal undertaking evolved into a highly centralised, highly unequal society. There was probably no sudden change or power grab: each generation built on the work of the last, and strides in efficiency were paid for with small sacrifices of freedom and equality. Rewarding labour with grants of food from the benevolent temple became, in time, a way of compelling hard work through the control of rations.
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Ben Wilson (Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention)
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The mountainous terrain of Iran means that it is difficult to create an interconnected economy, and that it has many minority groups each with keenly defined characteristics. As a result of this diversity, Iran has traditionally centralised power and used force and a fearsome intelligence network to maintain internal stability. Tehran knows that no one is about to invade Iran, but also that hostile powers can use its minorities to try and stir dissent and thus endanger its Islamic revolution.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography)
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Life can be random or in order
Your possibilities can be minimum
The probability amplitude broader
Whats your spiritual fodder?
Soul centralised... miracles #Mickeymized!
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Dr Mickey Mehta
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The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal.
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George Orwell (1984)
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If Amman was to benefit as an economic and political power centre during the time that the West Bank was part of Jordan, this was neither entirely inevitable nor purely the result of the social forces of centralisation. In part it was the product of regime policy,14 concerned that the centre of gravity of the state should stay with Amman as an important instrument in the incorporation of the West Bank. For geographical and historical reasons Jerusalem was the obvious alternate pole in the new state, not least because it had been the seat of the British administration under the mandate. As Avi Plascow has put it: ‘The [Jordanian] regime’s general policy was to prevent Jerusalem from either gaining special status or becoming a symbolic focus for divisive West Bank–East Bank antagonism.’15 The authorities in Amman set about the task with conviction.
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Philip Robins (A History of Jordan)
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Capitalism is a centralisation machine.
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Joshua Dávila (Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It)
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I can’t believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children.
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John Taylor Gatto (The Underground History of American Education, Volume I: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling)
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Adam Smith’s great insight was to show that the marketplace can mobilise diffuse information about people’s wants and the cost of meeting them, thereby coordinating billions of buyers and sellers through a global system of prices – all without the need for a centralised grand plan. This distributed efficiency of the market is indeed extraordinary, and attempting to run an economy without it typically leads to short supplies and long queues. It was out of recognition of this power that the neoliberal scriptwriters put the market centre stage in their economic play. There is, however, a flip side to the market’s power: it only values what is priced and only delivers to those who can pay. Like fire, it is extremely efficient at what it does, but dangerous if it gets out of control. When the market is unconstrained, it degrades the living world by over-stressing Earth’s sources and sinks. It also fails to deliver essential public goods – from education and vaccines to roads and railways – on which its own success deeply depends.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
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Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
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Eccentrics, Tess thought. From the Latin ex centro. Away from the centre, resistant to the centralising process that made everyone the same. It wasn’t easy to be eccentric, she concluded. To be brave enough. And she rather thought that she would have liked Edward Westerman.
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Rosanna Ley (The Villa)
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Meritocracy – going back to Plato’s Guardians – is about centralised authority. Meritocracy asserts that humanity can advance rapidly only under the guidance of geniuses, the smartest people in the world.
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Michael Faust (Crapitalism (The Political Series Book 4))
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This, of course, had long been Teilhard de Chardin’s preferred explanation for the Great Silence. Chardin saw sophidetonation as an implosion inward rather than an explosion outward: a form of centralisation like the evolution of the brain, but threading across the planet rather than rebounding within the skull. This was what he called Point Omega, a form of transcendence where intelligence essentially disappears into its own self-created virtual domain, leaving mundane reality behind all together. Never one to miss a religious resonance, Chardin noted that this ‘supreme synthesis’ is a ‘phenomenon perhaps outwardly akin to death’.
In fact, this was the final one of Shklovsky’s ‘internal contradictions’: if reason consists in denying natural inclinations then, of course, it will end up etherealising itself out of existence...
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Thomas Moynihan (X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction)
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Guérin's leftist, class-based critique of Jacobinism thus had three related implications for contemporary debates about political tactics and strategy. First, it implied a rejection of "class collaboration" and therefore of any type of alliance with the bourgeois Left (Popular Frontism). Second, it implied that the revolutionary movement should be uncompromising, that it should push for more radical social change and not stop halfway (which, as Saint Just famously remarked, was to dig one's own grave), rejecting the Stalinist emphasis on the unavoidability of separate historical "stages" in the long-term revolutionary process. Third, it implied a rejection both of the Leninist model of a centralised, hierarchical party dominating the labour movement and of the "substitutism" (substitution of the party for the proletariat) which had come to characterize the Bolshevik dictatorship.
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David Berry (For a Libertarian Communism (Revolutionary Pocketbooks))
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The Germanic morality cannot be arranged in a hierarchy of good qualities. There is not the slightest approach among the Teutons to a system in which one virtue is vaulted above another like a series of heavens. Such an order of precedence presupposes centralisation; all men must be united under the same condemnation before they can be classified. Neither has the Germanic mind any conception of a common moral Gehenna. Strictly speaking, evil, nidinghood, has no reality at all, but must be interpreted as a negative, a total lack of human qualities. Nidinghood is the shadow every "honour" casts according to its nature. Therefore the boundary line between admiration and contempt stands sharply, without transition stages, without any neutral grey. And therefore the boundary lies differently for different people. What makes a man a niding, a criminal and a wretch, depends on what made him a man of honour.
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Vilhelm Grønbech (The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2)
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Instead, nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek and Communist armies under Mao Zedong battled for supremacy until 1949, when the Communists emerged victorious and the Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. That same year Radio Beijing announced: ‘The People’s Liberation Army must liberate all Chinese territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Hainan and Taiwan.’ Mao centralised power to an extent never seen in previous dynasties. He blocked Russian influence in Inner Mongolia and extended Beijing’s influence into Mongolia. In 1951 China completed its annexation of Tibet (another vast non-Han territory), and by then Chinese school textbook maps were beginning to depict China as stretching even into the Central Asian republics. The country had been put back together; Mao would spend the rest of his life ensuring it stayed that way and consolidating Communist Party control in every facet of life, but turning away from much of the outside world. The country remained desperately poor, especially away from the coastal areas, but unified.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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Institutions which govern our lives are inherently corrupt, having been created, infiltrated and co-opted for the purpose of our subjugation and enslavement.
The currently political economy farms humans and harvests the wealth they create for the benefit of a small number of individuals and their families. Farming of humans has a long history and we are approaching the apogee of centralised power which plans the total submission of humanity to its will and population reduction to optimise land and resources for the exclusive use of the “farmers”.
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Clive Menzies
“
In hindsight, the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum in 2016 were intended to divide the 99%, thus diverting attention from the real authors of human misery… money power and centralised control. Prior to both Trump and Brexit, more people were awakening to the reality of centralised power but since then, the “99%” have turned on each other. Meanwhile, the trajectory towards one world government and the new world order continues. Trump is not his own man and Brexit is an illusion and theatrical distraction; the UK’s military, financial, legal, social and legal arrangements are being woven ever tighter into the dictatorship of the European Union, NATO and the United Nations.
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Clive Menzies
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Counter-Reformation, or whatever it be called, did attempt to save the Church from the scandals of the past, and to a certain extent succeeded. But it did so by increased centralisation, and a hardening of temper, alien from earlier movements of reform.
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John Neville Figgis (Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius)
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In early Soviet times, when Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic, Moscow's policy of korenizatsiia - 'nativisation' - prompted a brief flourishing of a Ukrainian avant-garde, paywrights and poets and journalists attracted to this bustling city of industrial and trading fame, allowed to write in their own language at last. The policy was the Bolsheviks' attempt to endear this restive republic, and the others, to their rule. In this political environment, writers were elevated.
This special treatment came, however, came with the heavy caveat of state control which was followed by repression - a story familiar across the Soviet Union. But in Kharkiv the axe fell quicker.
Stalin grew tired of korenizatsiia and opted to wipe out the native intelligentsia instead. In the early 1930s, the party line shifted abruptly; Ukrainian 'bourgeois nationalism' was the new enemy. The purges began. The Soviet Union under Stalin's paranoid control regressed to Tsarist ways. Russification and centralisation, brutal orders issued by Moscow and carried out by its secret police.
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Jen Stout (Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War (BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week))
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Centralisation is mainly an idea of order; decentralisation, one of freedom. . . . Order requires intelligence and is conducive to efficiency; while freedom calls for. and opens the door to, intuition and leads to innovation.
The larger an organisation, the more obvious and inescapable is the need for order. But if this need is looked after with such efficiency and perfection that no scope remains for man to exercise his creative intuition, for entrepreneurial disorder, the organisation becomes moribund and a desert of frustration.
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Ernst F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered)
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from the roots to the foliage, you notice that plants are constructed on a diffuse model, the opposite of the centralised animal model. It is an organisation that allows for freedom and strength at the same time.
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Stefano Mancuso (The Nation of Plants)
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People cherish a democratic nation that values decentralisation, accountability and transparency. Yet, few show concern, or no concern at all, about a centralised banking system that disregards these very principles.
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Mwanandeke Kindembo
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Democracy becomes an illusion in a nation with a centralised banking system, as such a structure inevitably leads to unequal wealth distribution.
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Mwanandeke Kindembo
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