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Apr 30, 2006

Portrait Of A Patriot...

by Eric Berne
author of Games People Play

The road to freedom is through laughter, and until he learns that, man will be enslaved, either subservient to his masters or fighting to serve under a new master. The masters know this very well and that is why they are masters. The last thing they will allow is unseemly laughter. In freer countries, every college has its humor magazine, but there are no such jokes in slave-holding nations like Nazi Germany or Arabia. Authority cannot be killed by force for wherever one head is cut off, another springs up in its place. It can only be laughed away, as Sun Tzu knew when he founded the science of military discipline. He first demonstrated this to the Emperor by using girls from the harem, but they giggled when he gave his orders. He knew that as long as they were laughing, discipline wouldn’t work. So he stopped their laughing by executing two of them, and after that the rest did as they were told–solemnly and indignantly. Conversely, no comedian has ever been the head of a state for very long; the people might stand it, but he couldn’t.

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1 Comments:

At May 4, 2006 at 6:27 AM, Blogger Aaron said...

Yes! Yes! Yes!

We can't have too many links to this wonderful piece of work. What would we do without Stephen Colbert?

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg! Hilarious!

Thank you!

 

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