This socio-political phenomenon is not recent. It occurred at the beginning of the
I also asked him if something else was true, something that I happened to hear when I had my accident—or rather, when Andreas Northam had had his accident. I wanted to know whether even in case of an accident if the authorities only take into consideration the technical and medical variables without assigning any responsibility.
“That’s where education comes in, as I mentioned to you before. First of all, the likelihood of a car accident or any other kind of accident occurring is extremely low nowadays. But suppose that something like this happens and the driver of the
There is a saying here, as Stefan told me, that says that the man of today, the
“The same goes for the extremely rare occasion of someone illegally having a child,” Stefan continued. “The state does not envisage such a thing happening out of intention or carelessness because the respect for our demographic institutions precludes such possibility. In such matters, statistics are our infallible guide: such low percentages of illegal births cannot affect or disturb, even in the slightest, either the process of population screening or the rhythm of life. The compulsions and penalties have been replaced by domestic laws. Truly civilised people, people with ‘inner culture’, cannot do something that is wrong. Even if you force them to, so to speak, they cannot! Let’s look into the matter of signing up for the ‘service’, for example: if you search among the millions of young men and women, you won’t find a single person that would try to avoid it! Quite the contrary, in fact. Our leaders and educators are forced to fight, with proper instruction and arguments, the feeling of inferiority and unjustified remorse for those few children that annually, due to health problems, are not accepted into the
He again stressed the simplicity of the existing institutions, assuring me that there were no other ones, apart from those concerning the ‘service’, population screening and traffic control.
“So few constraints,” he said with some obvious pride, “so few institutions and this lack of authority and enforcement in an individual’s life creates a great deal of space for individual freedom—always combined with self-discipline, of course. Nowadays no one stops you from travelling to the other side of the world, from saying and doing whatever you want, believing in whatever you want, the way you see fit. Education—from the most basic to the highest—the
I asked him how the lack of any form of enforcement, as he says, is compatible with the work of the