03/22/2023
ALBERT EINSTEIN :
"My political ideal is Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.
I am quite aware that it is necessary for the success of any complex undertaking that one man should do the thinking and directing and in general bear the responsibility. But the led must not be compelled, they must be able to choose their leader if they need one at all.
An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates no matter how democratic it starts. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in the world to-day.
The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the Government run State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the Government run State military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him.
He has only been given his big brain by mistake; bones and muscles was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism-how I hate them!
War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.
And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by the State political interests acting and indoctrinating the young and the old through the schools and the Media."
Einstein, Albert
"The World As I See It"
