Under the present system it was impossible for anyone to succeed in life without injuring other people and treating them and making use of them as one would not like to be treated and made use of oneself.
In order to succeed in the world it was necessary to be brutal, selfish and unfeeling: to push others aside and to take advantage of their misfortunes: to undersell and crush out one’s competitors by fair means or foul: to consider one’s own interests first in every case, absolutely regardless of the wellbeing of others. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
All who live under the present system practise selfishness, more or less. We must be selfish: the System demands it. We must be selfish or we shall be hungry and ragged and finally die in the gutter. The more selfish we are the better off we shall be. In the ‘Battle of Life’ only the selfish and cunning are able to survive: all others are beaten down and trampled underfoot. No-one can justly be blamed for acting selfishly – it is a matter of self-preservation – we must either injure or be injured. It is the system that deserves to be blamed. What those who wish to perpetuate the system deserve is another question. ibid.
Unless the present system is altered, that is all we have to look forward to; and yet you’re one of the upholders of the present system – you help to perpetuate it! ibid.
Well, we’re all living in a house called the Money System; and as a result most of us are suffering from a disease called poverty. There’s so much the matter with the present system that it’s no good tinkering at it. Everything about it is wrong and there’s nothing about it that’s right. There’s only one thing to be done with it and that is to smash it up and have a different system altogether. We must get out of it. ibid.
‘No one can be blamed for doing the best he can for himself under existing circumstances,’ said Owen in reply to Slyme’s questioning look. ‘This is the principle of the present system – every man for himself and the devil take the rest. For my own part I don’t pretend to practise unselfishness. I don’t pretend to guide my actions by the rules laid down in the Sermon the Mount. But it’s certainly surprising to hear you who profess to be a follower of Christ – advocating selfishness. Or, rather, it would be surprising if it were not that the name of ‘Christians’ has ceased to signify one who follows Christ, and has come to mean only liar and hypocrite.’ ibid.
‘In this matter the difference between ‘Christians’ and Socialists is this: Christ taught the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Men. Those who today pretend to be Christ’s followers hypocritically profess to carry out those teachings now. But they don’t. They have arranged ‘The Battle of Life’ system instead!’ ibid.
The Socialist – very much against his will – finds himself in the midst of this horrid battle, and he appeals to the other combatants to cease from fighting and establish a system of Brotherly Love and Mutual Helpfulness, but he does not hypocritically pretend to practise brotherly love towards those who will not agree to his appeal, and who compel him to fight with them for his very life. He knows that in this battle he must either fight or go under. Therefore, in self-defence, he fights; but all the time he continues to appeal for the cessation of the slaughter. He pleads for the changing of the system. He advocates Co-operation instead of Competition; but how can he co-operate with people who insist on competing with him? No individual can co-operate by himself! ibid.
If all the money were distributed equally amongst all the people tomorrow, it would all be up in heaps again in a very short time. But that only proves that while the present Money System remains, it will be impossible to do away with poverty, for heaps in some places man little or nothing in other places. ibid.
Owen listened with contempt and anger. Here was a man who grumbled at the present state of things, yet took no trouble to think for himself and try to alter them, and who at the first chance would vote for the perpetuation of the System which produced his misery. ibid.
They humiliated, degraded and pauperised those who received them, and the existence of the societies prevented the problem being grappled with in a sane and practical manner. The people lacked the necessaries of life: the necessaries of life are produced by Work; these people were willing to work but were prevented from doing so by the idiotic system of society which these ‘charitable’ people are determined to do their best to perpetuate. ibid.
Usually whenever Owen reflected upon the gross injustices and inhumanity of the existing social disorder, he became convinced that it could not possibly last; it was bound to all to pieces because of its own rottenness. ibid.
And then the starving, bootless, ragged, stupid wretches fell down and worshipped the System, and offered up their children as living sacrifices upon its altars. ibid.
All the evils that I have referred to are only symptoms of the one disease that is sapping the moral, mental and physical life of the nation, and all attempts to cure these symptoms are foredoomed to failure, simply because they are the symptoms and not the disease. ibid.
To judge by their unwillingness to consider any proposals to alter the present system, one might have supposed that they were afraid of losing something, instead of having nothing to lose – except their poverty. ibid.
A cell of a higher organism contains a thousand different substances, arranged in a complex system. This great organized system was not discovered by chemical or physical methods; they are inadequate to its refinement and delicacy and complexity. Herbert Spencer Jennings
There are living systems; there is no living matter. No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possesses, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell. Jacques Monod
I was fucked many times by the system. Ayrton Senna
This is a story about the rise of machines. And our belief in the balance of nature. How the idea of the ecosystem was invented. How it inspired us. And how it wasn’t even true. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace II: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Networks, BBC 2011
In the mass democracies of the west a new ideology has risen up. We have come to believe that the old hierarchies of power can be replaced by self-organising networks. ibid.
This is the story of the rise of the dream of the self-organising system. And the strange machine fantasy of nature that underpins it. ibid.
It was part of what [Arthur] Tansley called, ‘the great universal law of equilibrium’. All these systems, he wrote, are constantly tending towards positions of balance or equilibrium … There was an underlying mechanism that regulated nature as if it were a machine. But it was only an hypothesis’. ibid.
Cybernetics saw human beings not as individuals in charge of their own destiny but as components in systems. At its heart, Cybernetics was a computer’s idea of the world. And from that perspective there was no difference between human beings and machines. They were just nodes in networks acting and reacting to flows in information. ibid.
Cybernetics transformed the idea of the eco-system because it seemed to explain how the system stabilises. ibid.
‘I will make my life an experiment to search for the principles that govern the universe.’ ibid. Buckminster Fuller
What began to rise up in the 1970s was the idea that we and everything else on the planet are connected together in complex webs and networks. Out of that were going to come epic visions of connectivity. ibid.
Eco-systems did not tend towards stability but the very opposite was true. That nature far from seeking equilibrium was always in a state of dynamic and unpredictable change. ibid.
The politicians had to face a crisis at home: they had given power to the banks because the bankers and financial technocrats had promised they could hold the economy stable. But in 2008 the whole intricate system of credit and loans that the banks had created collapsed. And there was growing panic, and giant financial institutions faced bankruptcy. The politicians in America and Britain stepped in and rescued the banks. As they did so they began to discover that most of the major financial institutions were also riddled with corruption. But unlike President Roosevelt in the 1930s they didn’t then transform the system. Instead, the simply propped it up. Adam Curtis, Bitter Lake, BBC 2015
The Soviet Union became instead a society where no-one believed in anything or had any vision of the future. Adam Curtis, HyperNormalisation, BBC 2016
The plan had run out of control. But rather than reveal this, the technocrats began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan. And what emerged instead was a fake version of society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real. Because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everyone had to play along and pretend that it was real. Because no-one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it HyperNormalisation. You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal. ibid.
Garrison: Another secret system of power that controlled the country. But you could never discover it through normal means because it was so deeply hidden … In a dark world of hidden power you couldn’t expect everything to make sense. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head I: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain, BBCiplayer 2021
We are entering the age of consequence: a rapacious financial system, escalating organised violence, abject poverty for millions, and the looming environmental fallout, are converging. The Four Horsemen, 2012
It’s a film that questions the systems we’ve created and suggests ways to reform them. ibid.
Six ages define the lifespan of an empire: the age of pioneers, the age of conquests, the age of commerce, the age of affluence, the age of intellect ending with bread and circuses in the age of decadence. ibid.
All made celebrities of their chefs. ibid.
Why have we not had the will to change a vicious social structure? ibid.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. ibid. Frederic Bastiat
Only the government has the power to issue Fiat money but banks can create it through lending … The Supply of money has grown exponentially. ibid.
So far, they’ve [Goldman Sachs] got away scot-free with this massive heist. ibid.
The more we grow, the more poverty we create. ibid.
The system is rigged. Donald Trump