JuanPabloDuarte
2nd September 2005, 02:16
From the book: Human All Too Human
Subordination.— The subordination that is valued so highly in military and bureaucratic states will soon become as unbelievable to us as the secret tactics of the Jesuits have already become; and when this subordination is no longer possible, it will no longer be possible to achieve a number of its most astonishing consequences, and the world will be the poorer. Subordination must vanish, for its basis is vanishing: belief in absolute authority, in ultimate truth. Even in military states, physical coercion is not sufficient to produce subordination; rather it requires an inherited adoration of princeliness, as of something suprahuman.— In freer situations, one subordinates himself only on conditions, as a consequence of a mutual contract, that is, without any prejudice to self-interest.
443
Hope and presumption.— Our social order will slowly melt away, as all earlier orders have done when the suns of new ideas shone forth with new warmth over the people. One can desire this melting only in that one has hope; and one may reasonably have hope only if one credits his own heart and head, and that of his equals, with more strength than one credits to the representatives of the existing order. Usually, therefore, this hope will be a piece of presumption and an overvaluation.
Subordination.— The subordination that is valued so highly in military and bureaucratic states will soon become as unbelievable to us as the secret tactics of the Jesuits have already become; and when this subordination is no longer possible, it will no longer be possible to achieve a number of its most astonishing consequences, and the world will be the poorer. Subordination must vanish, for its basis is vanishing: belief in absolute authority, in ultimate truth. Even in military states, physical coercion is not sufficient to produce subordination; rather it requires an inherited adoration of princeliness, as of something suprahuman.— In freer situations, one subordinates himself only on conditions, as a consequence of a mutual contract, that is, without any prejudice to self-interest.
443
Hope and presumption.— Our social order will slowly melt away, as all earlier orders have done when the suns of new ideas shone forth with new warmth over the people. One can desire this melting only in that one has hope; and one may reasonably have hope only if one credits his own heart and head, and that of his equals, with more strength than one credits to the representatives of the existing order. Usually, therefore, this hope will be a piece of presumption and an overvaluation.