Listen Little Man will never age.
This tiny little book is one of the few things in life that will never be out of date and always a valuable reminder. These words were spoken by no less a man than Wilhelm Reich
If you are not familiar with Reich, he was born 1897 in what is now Ukraine, then part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, a student of Freud who excelled at character analysis. He ended up in the US where during WW2 he was hounded by the FBI in a mistaken identity error (before big data) spending time in the Penitentiary as a result. Not all of his work was so enlightened but this one should be compulsory reading.
“and your America could end in the regime of a KKK.”
“For twenty-five years, in the written and spoken word, I have advocated your right to happiness in the world; have accused you of your inability to take what belongs to you, to secure what you had gained in the bloody battles of the Pads and Vienna barricades, in the American emancipation or in the Russian revolution. Your Paris ended in Petain and Laval your Vienna in Hitler; your Russia in Stalin, and your America could end in the regime of a KKK.
You knew better how to win your freedom than how to safeguard it for yourself and others. I have known this for a long time. What I could not understand was why, every time you had fought your way laboriously out of one morass, you got into a worse one. Then, slowly and gropingly, I found what makes you a slave: YOU ARE YOUR OWN SLAVE-DRIVER. Nobody else — nobody except you yourself carries the responsibility for your slavery. Nobody else.”
British pensioners who never fought for anything other than their position in a queue or bullying poor people in some far distant land, forgot the lessons of their fathers and voted to support far-right Nazis who will bankrupt Britain morally and financially and lead the world closer to war, then die and leave the legacy to their children. What a difference a generation can make.
Americans learned about the civil war in school and know better than to put a Klan supporter in the Whitehouse. Thankfully they took to the streets to make their feelings known.
Within 70 years of Hiroshima, we had a Loon poking sharp sticks in a psychopath with an atomic bomb and all the press can talk about is how to lose weight without going on a diet.
The people working on artificial intelligence have no idea what a mess they are about to unleash. I suggest we leave that Genie in the bottle.
The point made by Reich who I urge you to read and the point I am making now, is that only you can enslave you, but once you allow the noose around your hands, the chance is gone, the decision made and it cant hardly be unravelled without terrible bloodshed.
Listen Little man, or big man or great woman, you owe it to your children and theirs.
