In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak, and act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the tendency of individuals to conform to group thought in response to perceived threats, emphasizing blind loyalty to the state.
Randolph Bourne's quote reflects on the human instinct to seek safety and belonging in times of perceived danger, often leading to a loss of individuality and critical thinking. It warns against the dangers of nationalism and conformity, as people may become overly devoted to the state and its ideologies, viewing it as a paternal figure that demands unquestioning loyalty and collective action.
In practice
During a political rally, this quote could be used to challenge blind allegiance to the state.
We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear. Although we can never rivet our fortune so tight as to make it impregnable, we may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life that we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.
The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated.
War is the Health of the State.
There was a hysteria in there, certainly, but there was also the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things in the last twenty-four hours, without ever getting a proper breakfast.
The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness. It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.
Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty.
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
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