Reflections

“Society consists of a number of individual wills living in association. There is no such thing as a general will of society, except insofar as all these individual wills agree in desiring certain material things, e.g., food and clothes. It is also true, perhaps, that all desire happiness and goodness, but their conceptions of these may and do conflict with each other. Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing. Such an ideal government, of course, does not and could not ever exist. It presupposes that every individual in society possesses equal power, and also that every individual takes part in the government. In practice, the majority is always ruled by a minority.“ ~ W. H. Auden, My Belief [1]

"If you see that some aspect of your society is bad and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with one one thing: you can become better yourself." ~ Leo Tolstoy

Contexts

• #notecard