Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong — and demonstrably more destructive — for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.
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"Some Random Thoughts About the War On Drugs" 13 June 2010L. Neil Smith
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Which brings us to the arts, whose purpose, in common with astrology, is to use frauds in order to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on inside. And on and on.
Kurt Vonnegut
Law deals not with actual individuals, but with individuals artificially defined. We cannot say that law-makers are under an illusion to the effect that all men are equal. They do not even suppose them all alike in being reasonable, or in being well informed about the law, or in being morally sensitive about their own rights or the rights of others. Law-makers have probably never been blind about the conspicuous facts of human difference. Nevertheless, the law in every community — and not alone in modern communities — proposes to treat certain large groups of individuals as were alike "before the law."
William Ernest Hocking
Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.
L. Neil Smith
Now how can destructive powers be used for transformation ? First of all, when people know that there are destructive powers manifesting, they start fearing. They get afraid. That we'll be destroyed, so we must take to God. That's one of the ways. Secondly, if a person comes to know about any destructive disease like cancer, he wants to find out a method. And there is no method available on a human level. So then he thinks of God and wants to come nearer to God. The fear brings him closer to God. He depends on God more than on his rationality, than on his ego, or superego. And he wants to depend on God's powers to cure him or to save him from this destruction. So today we are going to pray that this force has to transform America through its capacity to frighten people so that they come to Sahaja Yoga. Because when things have reached this stage of ego, then when people say What's wrong? -Like in England when I started talking first, they said this is a Victorian woman, out of date, absolutely useless. I said "alright, I don't say anything. But you'll have such diseases that you'll have to come back". That was the time they pass the law that homosexuality should be allowed, permissiveness should be allowed, and all these things should be allowed. And now you have A.I.D.S. You have AIDS now here already operating. Now the AIDS has given the fear of the Ekadasha. Now have it ! What's wrong ! What about that ? So this awe and this fear is very important. Is an extremely important thing that you must have the awe and the fear that God is Almighty, and we are nothing before him. [17 September 1983, New York City]
Mataji Nirmala Srivastava
The innocent sounding First Thesis, taken seriously, forces us to move our attention away from the individual toward humanity. Since there are no limits to the application of reason, and reason does not work instinctively, but requires "trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another," individual human beings do not live long enough to learn the full use of reason. However, we find nature setting a short period for individual lives, but producing a series of generations in which each passes its own accomplishments onto its successor. The only way to make the capability of reasoning consistent with the First Thesis is to assume that rationality is to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.
Immanuel Kant
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