There are no unarguable axioms of value or worth, there are only inclinations and my inclinations have turned to an intense loathing of institutions, and most of the people in them; those spineless supplicants agape at the passing of other men's ideas, not drawn by desire, but driven by fear and ignorance, to the tepid hearth of
institutionalism. One may argue as to the qualities of a passing man's wife, but as a life philosophy it can only appeal to self-loathing celibates. How much better the subjective stance which curls the mind around the lovely creature in one's embrace!
This perception etched into me when I attended an Australian Institute of Physics conference at ANU with 900 career physicists, the body of which were snivelling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character. For every Feynman or Lorentz, 100 pen pushing wretches scratching each others eyes out in academic committees or building better bombs for the DSTO (Defence Science & Technology Organisation), who had provided everyone with a bag, embossed with their logo, which most physicists pathetically lugged about with pride and ignorance.
A year before, also at ANU, I represented my university at the Australian National Physics Competition. At the prize ceremony, the head of ANU physics, motioned to us and said, 'You are the cream of Australian physics'. I looked around, and thought, 'Christ Almighty, I hope he's wrong'.
Interesting Question
The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another....We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.
- Gustav Landauer, Schwache Stattsmanner, Schwacheres Volk!, June, 1910
Selected Correspondence:
