worldview and perspective on Coercion

When you pass beyond good and evil, you pass into the realm where might is right, and where anything that reminds you of the old moral values—for instance, a large Jewish community—stands in your way ...

Two thousand years ago, triumphal processions were massively popular. It was, in all likelihood, the only chance most people would have to see the leaders and heroes of the day. For the Romans they t...

Moralistic behavior change done for one's self simply manipulates and leverages radical selfishness without challenging it.

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.

There is no good or evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

The devil may also make use of morality.

Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely differen...

Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.

We will often stop at nothing to avoid cognitive dissonance. We will twist logic, bend reason, conveniently forget facts, invent new stories, even destroy relationships—all in the name of preserving o...

You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into.

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

I was recently brought in to talk with a group of corporate leaders who were trying to manage a difficult reorganization in their company. One of the project managers told me that, after listening to ...

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

Silence is evil's closest ally.

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.

Locked into captivity by an airplane seat, a kindly disposition of keeping a friend company, or a telephone connection, we become ex officio confessors to those with troubled consciences and traces, o...

In His book When Narcissism Comes to Church, Chuck DeGroat describes a common tool employed on social media, gaslighting: Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that draws its name from a 1938 Bri...

It is always crucial to remember that our beliefs are formed not only through reason and argument but also through social conditioning.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to ...

You cannot make men good by law.

To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue."

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

Fear and control are the basis for all human religions. From this common beginning the paths diverge dramatically, splinter, multiply, and finally terminate in different places. But each one is an att...

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.