“Solutions to private problems and public problems require the ability to think things through, logically, and to reject what is unworkable or biased—but above and beyond that, a person needs to be able to imagine solutions that haven’t been tried before.”
“Propaganda says: defect from your own power. Never find out what it is. Assume it isn’t there. Propaganda says: all life is about the species, not about the individual.”
“When propagandists find a good thing, a message that works, they pound on it, they keep hammering away. Family, group, family, group, community. On and on. They never promote the message called The Individual with the same intensity. That would be counter-productive to what they are trying to accomplish: group identity; and amnesia about being an individual.”
“Civilization continues to erode and decay, as individual power is put on the back burner. But that doesn’t give the individual a license to surrender. If others want to give up, that’s their business. The individual, instead, finds new frontiers for his power, for his capacity to invent reality.”
“There is you, there is your own power. And what is that power? It comes in two forms or venues. First, there is the ability to apply logic to events and information; to think rationally from A to B to C; to analyze. And second, there is imagination, the capacity to conceive and then invent realities that would never otherwise exist in the world.”
“You exercise your creative power to fulfill what you deeply desire; and that process will, in fact, spill over and affect others in a positive way. It will lift them up. It will remind them that they, too, have power.”
“Logic and analysis keeps you from being sent down wrong roads, keeps you from buying official reality. Logic also reminds you that you have a mind. Logic is a road that can take you deeper and deeper into more basic fallacies that underpin organized society and its branches of knowledge. Logic tells you there are always more fundamental questions to ask and answer. There are levels of lies. The deeper you go, the more confident you become. The more powerful. Logic also lets you know when you’re projecting basic pre-judgments over a whole landscape and neglecting to look at the details.”
“Passivity is a disease. It spreads and takes over. It makes strong people weak, and weak people demented. The passive life is precisely and exactly a life without power. The cure is a life lived with power.”
“In case there is any misunderstanding, the ability to help others and defend them from oppression is part and parcel of your own power. How could you help them without your power? How could you accomplish anything at all in that direction? How would denying your own power possibly result in a good outcome? And most importantly, it is through imagination that you can devise new ways to expose and reduce oppression, ways that haven’t been thought of before.”
“As society continues to decay, more and people attack individual power and place their faith in a program that reduces every human to a lowest common denominator of dependence on some controlling entity. This article of faith is abject surrender.”
“Some people want to say that power is a neutral object that can be used for good or evil. That isn’t true. Your deepest power is alive. It’s personal. It’s stunningly energetic and dynamic. It connects with your deepest understanding of what is true and good and right. But it never sacrifices itself on the altar of what others insist is good and true and right. It never deserts you for an abstract ideology someone else has devised. That ideology was formulated, in fact, to separate you from your power.”
“It takes great energy for a person to bury his own strength. Why not use that energy to multiply your power?”
The creative power of the individual, which is the key to his future, his happiness, his freedom, flows from his imagination.