[67] News from Absurdistan - From a Slave's Point of View

Yesterday, I had a conversation about state-ordained bans of smoking, an issue that I will have to write about more fully soon.

I was told that publicans are faced with divergent views on the matter, and that some of them seem not to be able or willing to handle the controversy by taking a personal stance on how the issue should be dealt with on their own private property.

So let the state decide.

(The fact that some pubs, indeed a large number of them, are privately owned is characteristically overlooked when people argue about smoking in "public places".)

Diversity of opinion, diversity in the way in which people decide to go about shaping their property and private sphere is too much of a burden on the individual in modern-day Germany.

So let the state decide.

Some think parents should treat their children one way, some think they should treat them differently. It is hard to decide how to treat your children in the face of so much diversity.

So let the state decide.

This is common sense in Germany.

I suspect, this is one of the reasons why Germans are dying out (more of them dying than being borne), while pet animals - especially cats and dogs - are on the rise.

For those having unlearned the art of personal responsibility, children are, indeed, too much of a challenge.

By contrast, pets do not have to be dealt with "democratically" - with them, you do not have to give up what you should be standing for, because a tyrannical majority overrules your conviction, and - by the constant application of that force - moulds your beliefs until you cannot tell them from what you are only being told to think and do.

Actually, remote control of what you are all about, crude incursions into your conscience, the collectivisation of morality will keep encroaching upon you even though you prefer to raise pets rather than children (in the hope to be left with something genuinely of your own) - but then: pets are just pets, are they not - like yourself, lucky or unlucky, as the case my be, depending on the fortuity of whatever happen to be the whims of your owner.

We are taught to think that the state owes us a living, and forget that by assuming this attitude, we increasingly owe the state our life.