#276: A Society Without Discipline

“After a few years of bloody anarchy it will be necessary to establish a power whose tyranny will inevitably be far severer than that which was overthrown. Science has not yet discovered the magic ring capable of saving a society without discipline. There is no need to impose discipline when it has become hereditary, but when the primitive instincts have been allowed to destroy the barriers painfully erected by slow ancestral labours, they cannot be reconstituted save by an energetic tyranny.”*

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*Le Bon, Gustave. The Psychology of Revolution (pp. 34-35). Kindle Edition.

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (French: ... 7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a leading French polymath [a person of encyclopedic learning] whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology. | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon

#262: Repeated Trajectory

The motto of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a true manifestation of hope and faith at the beginning of the [French] Revolution, soon merely served to cover a legal justification of the sentiments of jealousy, cupidity, and hatred of superiors, the true motives of crowds unrestrained by discipline. This is why the Revolution so soon ended in disorder, violence, and anarchy.

From the moment when the Revolution descended from the middle to the lower classes of society, it ceased to be a domination of the instinctive by the rational, and became, on the contrary, the effort of the instinctive to overpower the rational.”*

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* Le Bon, Gustave. The Psychology of Revolution (pp. 41-42). . Kindle Edition.

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (French: ... 7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a leading French polymath [a person of encyclopedic learning] whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology. | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon

#119: “To Methodize Anarchy”

“...what was done in France was a wild attempt to methodize anarchy; to perpetuate and fix disorder. That it was a foul, impious, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature. He undertook to prove, that it was generated in treachery, fraud, falsehood, hypocrisy, and unprovoked murder. ... That by the terror of assassination they had driven away a very great number of the members, so as to produce a false appearance of a majority.—That this fictitious majority had fabricated a constitution, which as now it stands, is a tyranny far beyond any example that can be found in the civilized European world of our age.”*

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*from P. J. Marshall, Donald C. Bryant, and William B. Todd (eds), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 4: Party, Parliament, and the Dividing of the Whigs: 1780–1794 (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 376 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke (Bold emphasis added.)

Edmund Burke (... 12 January [NS] 1729[2] – 9 July 1797) was an Irish statesman, economist, and philosopher. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party after moving to London in 1750. Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state.[3] These views were expressed in his A Vindication of Natural Society. He criticised the actions of the British government towards the American colonies, including its taxation policies.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke