"When a military spirit forsakes a people, the profession of arms immediately ceases to be held in honour, and military men fall to the lowest rank of public servants; they are little esteemed and no longer understood ... Hence arises a circle of cause and consequence from which it is difficult to escape - the best part of the nation shuns the military profession because the profession is not honoured, and the profession is not honoured because the best part of the nation has ceased to follow it."

"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democrat attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."

"When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right which the majority has of commanding, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind."

"You don't have power if you surrender all your principles - you have office." TUC leader Jun 88 on widening the appeal of the Labour Party

Ron Todd

"Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow. Future shock is the human response to overstimulation. Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the super-imposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society. To survive, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before, searching out totally new ways to anchor himself, as old roots weaken under the onslaught of the accelerative thrust. To do so, he must first understand transience."

"A growing body of reputable opinion asserts that the present moment represents nothing less than the second great divide in human history, comparable in magnitude only with that first break in historic continuity, the shift from barbarism to civilisation."

"Whatever happened to some men in the past affects virtually all men today. This was not always true."

"This acceleration lies behind the impermanence - the transience - that penetrates our consciousness, radically affecting the way we relate to other people, to things, to the entire universe of ideas, art and values. If acceleration is a new social force, transience is its psychological counterpart. There is a doubling of the total output of goods and services in the advanced societies about every fifteen years. This means that by the time an individual reaches old age, he will be surrounded by a society producing 32 times as much as when he was born."

"Technology feeds on itself, making more technology possible. Consider the self- reinforcing cycle of the process of technological innovation, being of three parts: the creative idea, its practical application and its diffusion through society."

"Permanence. In the past, permanence was the ideal. Man built to last, be it cathedral or boots. Repair was cheaper than replacement. As change accelerates, the economics of permanence must give way to the economics of transience: advances in technology lower costs of manufacture versus repair; they also make next-generation products better than the current one; accelerating change increases uncertainty about the future and we are less inclined to invest heavily in non-adaptable equipment (obsolescence due to substantive technological advance)."

"Transience. Rentalism reflects the move from lives based on having to lives based on doing or being. To live faster lives in the future, man must accept the advantages of affluence and advances in technology without the responsibility of accumulating possessions: he must learn to travel light."
"Caveat: The line between ‘fad’ and ordinary product will progressively blur. We are moving into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs. The increasingly frenetic turnover of throw-away, modular or rented commodities points us towards the inescapable ephemeralisation of the man-thing relationship."

"Distance. Never in history has distance meant less. Never have man’s relationships with place been more numerous, fragile and temporary. Figuratively, we ‘use up’ places and dispose of them as we do Kleenex or beer cans. Even ignoring air travel, the social investment in mobility is astonishing. Paved roads and streets in US have been growing at 200 miles per day for at least twenty years (1970), road growth outpacing population growth threefold."
"This busy movement of men back and forth is one of the identifying characteristics of super-industrial society. Pre-industrial nations seem congealed, frozen, their populations profoundly attached to a single place. Even in France, housing shortage continues to slow down internal mobility; despite this, 8-10% move house each year."

"Mobility. In Europe most of the new mobility can be attributed to the continuing transition from agriculture to industry; from the past to the present, as it were. In the US it grows out of the spread of automation and the new way of life associated with super-industrial society, the way of life in the future. Men with at least one year of college education move more and farther than those without. Some fear that travel and movement have destroyed society - there is no social season any more and one must invite many more people to ensure the correct number turn up. The automobile has become the modern symbol of initiation. The driving licence is a valid admission to adult society."
"Freedom from fixed social position is linked so closely with freedom from fixed geographical position, that when super-industrial man feels socially constricted his first impulse is to relocate. Socially, to travel is to gain status - hence why some insist on retaining years-old airline tags on luggage. Those who spend their college years away from home move in less restricted circles than uneducated and more home-bound manual workers. Not only do these college people move more in later life, they also pass on attitudes to their children that facilitate mobility."

"Commitment. The disruption of relocation, especially if repeated, breeds a loss of commitment, particularly noted among the high mobiles. The man on the move is in too much of a hurry to put down roots in any one place. Non-involvement, limited participation are criticised as a menace to traditional grass-roots democracy. But this may show greater moral responsibility, by refusing to make local decisions which will effect others long after they move away. Commitment takes many forms, including attachment to place. We can understand the significance of mobility only if we first recognise the centrality of fixed place in the psychological architecture of traditional man. Commitments are shifting from place-related social structures (city, nation) to those (profession, corporation, friendship network) that are themselves mobile, fluid, and, for all practical purposes, place-less. We have all learnt to invest with emotional content those relationships that appear to us to be ‘permanent’ or relatively long-lasting, while withholding emotion from shorter-term relationships."

"Characteristically, urbanites meet one another in highly segmental roles, their dependence upon others is confined to a highly fractionalised aspect of the other’s round of activity. We merely maintain superficial and partial contact with someone."

"Career. Any change in job entails a certain amount of stress. The individual must strip himself of old habits, old ways of coping, and learns new ways of doing things. Even when the work task itself is similar, the environment in which it takes place is different. And just as is the case with moving to a new community, the newcomer is under pressure to form new relationships at high speed.
Perhaps a man should reach the peak of his responsibility very early in his career and then expect to be moved downwards instead of upwards, to more relaxing, simpler kinds of jobs."
"I used to be concerned when I saw a resume with several jobs in it. I would be afraid that the guy was a job-hopper or an opportunist. But I’m not concerned any more. What I want to know is why he made each move .. I’d také the man who moved .. [because] I’d know he’s adaptable." HCC official.

"The professional, academic and upper-managerial class is bound by interest ties across wide physical spaces and indeed can be said to have more functional relationships. Mobile individuals, easily duplicable relationships, and ties to interest problems depict this group. The throughput of people involves the ability not only to affiliate, but to disaffiliate. Those who seem most capable of this adaptive skill are also among the most richly rewarded in society. They are no longer intermeshed with the past, and, therefore, are capable of relating themselves easily to the present and the future. "
"This physical departure is only a small part of the total process of leaving that the mobile man must undergo. He must leave behind people as well as places. The friends of earlier years must be left, for acquaintances of the lower-status past are incompatible with the successful present. The clubs and cliques of his family and his youth are left. But the most important and greatest problem of the man on the move is to leave the human relationships of his past."

"The greater the diversity available in both work and leisure, the greater the specialisation, and the more difficult it is to find just the right friends. Thus it has been estimated in Britain  that a minimum population of 1 000 000 is needed to provide a professional worker today with twenty interesting friends."

"More sophisticated managers are recognising that in a world of accelerating change re-organisation is, and must be, an on-going process, rather than a once-in-a-lifetime affair. Task forces and other ad hoc groups are now proliferating throughout the government and business bureaucracies, both in the US and abroad. Transient teams come together to solve a specific problem and then separate. Where Organisation Man seeks status and prestige within the organisation, Associative Man seeks it without. OM filled a predetermined slots, AM moves from slot to slot in a complex pattern that is largely self-motivated. Where OM was fearful of risk, AM welcomes it, knowing that in an affluent and fast-changing society even failure is transient."

"Just as we make and break our relationships with people and organisations at an ever more rapid pace, so, too, we must turn over our conceptions of reality, our mental images of the world at shorter and shorter intervals."

"What is occurring now is not a crisis of capitalism, but of industrial society itself, regardless of its political form. We are simultaneously experiencing a youth revolution, a racial revolution, a colonial revolution, an economic revolution, and the most rapid and deep-going technological revolution in history. The problem is not whether man can survive regimentation and standardisation. The problem, as we shall see, is whether he can survive freedom."

"It is obstinate nonsense to insist, in the face of all this, that the machines of tomorrow will turn us into robots, steal our individuality, eliminate cultural variety, etc, etc. Because primitive mass production imposed certain uniformities, does not mean that super-industrial machines will do the same. The fact is that the entire thrust of the future carries away from standardisation - away from uniform goods, away from homogenised art, mass-produced education and ‘mass’ culture. We have reached a dialectic turning point in the technological development of society. And technology, far from restricting our individuality, will multiply our choices - and our freedom - exponentially."
"There comes a time when choice, rather than freeing the individual, becomes so difficult, costly and complex, that it turns into its opposite. There comes a time, in short, when choice turns into overchoice and freedom into un-freedom." [cf: US long-distance comms]
 

"As society moves towards greater specialisation, it generates more and more subcultural diversity. We pay for the benefits we receive. Once we psychologically affiliate with a sub-cult, it begins to exert pressure on us. We find that it pays to ‘go along’ with the group. It rewards us with warmth, friendship and approval when we conform to its lifestyle model. But is punishes us ruthlessly with ridicule, ostracism or other tactics when we deviate from it. It offers not a single product or idea, but a way of organising all products and ideas, a whole style, a set of guidelines that help the individual reduce the increasing complexity of choice to manageable proportions.
"Often we are unaware of the moment when we commit ourselves to one life-style model over all others. Most of us do not think of our lives in terms of life-style, and we often have difficulty in talking about it objectively. We have even more trouble when we try to articulate the structure of values implicit in our style. The task is doubly hard because many of us do not adopt a single integrated style, but a composite of elements drawn from several models. By zooming in on a particular lifestyle we exclude a vast number of alternatives from further consideration.
"The commitment to one style of life over another is thus a super-decision. It is a decision of a higher order that the general run of everyday life-decisions. It is a decision to narrow the range of alternatives that will concern us in the future. SO long as we operate within the confines of the style we have chosen, our choices are relatively simple. The guidelines are clear. The cult to which we belong helps us answer any questions; it keeps the guidelines in place.
But when our style is suddenly challenged, when something forces us to reconsider it, we are forced to make another super-decision. We face the painful need to transform not only ourselves, but our self-image as well.
If our life blend is too high in programmed decisions, we are not challenged; we find life boring and stultifying. We search for new ways, even unconsciously, to introduce novelty into our lives, thereby altering the decision ‘mix’."

"There is no evidence whatsoever that the value systems of the techno-societies are likely to return to a ‘steady state’ condition. For the foreseeable future, we must anticipate still more rapid value change. New society presents the individual with a contest that requires self-mastery and high intelligence. For the individual who comes armed with these, and who makes the necessary effort to understand the fast-emerging super-industrial social structure, for the person who finds the ‘right’ life pace, the ‘right’ sequence of subcults to join and life-style models to emulate, the triumph is exquisite."

"Ultimately, to manage change we must anticipate it. However the notion that one person’s future can be, to some extend, anticipated, flies in the face of persistent folk prejudice. Yet the truth is that we can assign probabilities to some of the changes that lie in store for us, especially certain large structural changes, and there are ways to use this knowledge in designing personal stability zones."

The term I use to describe the culture I grew up in is 'Ulster-British'. I do not like using the term 'Protestant' because of the sectarianism encouraged by the use of religious labels. Of the alternatives, the term 'Ulster-Scot' is not accurate, if only because it leaves out the not insignificant English settlements in Ulster and the term 'planter' is also inaccurate, for only a few of the Anglo-Scottish immigrants were actually planters and, more importantly, it omits the 'native' Irish who were and have been absorbed withi the cultural community which has developed here.
The term 'Ulster-British' is to be preferred because it emphasises the point that we do not see ourselves as a self contained community unique to this little bit of narrow ground. We are part of a larger grouping. Particularly in East Ulster, in any examination of culture, identity and perception, the very strong connections with northern England and Scotland stand out. Around the Irish Sea there is a triangle consisting of Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast. p.47.

"Lenin’s method leads to this: the Party organisation at first substitutes itself for the Party as a whole. Then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the Party organisation, and finally a single dictator substitutes himself for the central Committee." [1906]

Leon Trotsky

 "A leader is the man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don't want to do, and like it."

"To achieve victory for Communism throughout the world, we are prepared for any sacrifice."

 "Mir scheint es ein deutscher Nationalfehler zu sein, mit ungeheuerm Seelengeräusch im Resultat nicht viel mehr als andre Völker zu produzieren."

"Der Vorteil der Klugheit besteht darin, daß man sich dumm stellen kann. Das Gegenteil ist schon schwerer."

"The wrong sort of people are always in power because they would not be in power if they were not the wrong sort of people."

Jon Wynne Tyson

"To lead people, walk beside them ... As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate ... When the best leader's work is done the people say, 'We did it ourselves!'"

Lao Tzu

"What enables a wise
Sovereign or good general
To strike and to conquer
And to achieve things beyond
The reach of normal men
Is foreknowledge.
Foreknowledge comes only through spies.
Nothing is of more importance
To the state than the quality of its spies.
It is ten thousand times
Cheaper to pay the best
Spies lavishly than
Even a king's army poorly."

"If you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be in danger in every single battle."

"The way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak."

"For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."

"The quality of decision is like the well-timed swoop of a falcon which enables it to strike and destroy its victim."

"Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance."

"Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy."

"All warfare is based on deception."

"Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge."

"Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move."

"Of all those in the army close to the commander none is more intimate than the secret agent; of all rewards none more liberal than those given to secret agents; of all matters none is more confidential than those relating to secret operations."

"It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used."

"The ultimate in disposing one's troops is to be without ascertainable shape. Then the most penetrating spies cannot pry in nor can the wise lay plans against you."