“It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups of individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties, the minorities are either intimidated into silence or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion.”
“There is . . . in the feeling toward the State a large element of pure filial mysticism. This sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one’s desire back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feeling of protection . . . . [I]n Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posts of the Red Cross, we see how easily . . . the ruling organization is conceived in family terms. [People become] obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naïve faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort.”
“On most people the strain of being an independent adult weights heavily.” The State provides a way of eliminating “the psychic burden of adulthood.”
— Randolph Bourne, writing about the effects of the national emergency of war on the population in his famous 1918 essay, “War is the Health of the State.”
7:16 am on March 14, 2020
