April 3, 2007

Frenzy to eliminate the road back...

A good quote from Diogenes:

...Revolutionaries, once they've put the ancien régime to the guillotine, realize at some level that the victims easiest to catch and behead were seldom those most guilty of the oppression the insurrection was meant to cure. This means that, with the old power toppled, the main threat to the new order are associates of more tender conscience who remember the injustices inflicted by, not upon, the revolutionaries -- injustices rationalized at the time as necessary for the success of the revolution. Hence the secondary (and usually protracted) frenzy to eliminate the road back. When the revolution is cultural rather than civil, almost any surviving custom or symbol or figure of speech can be a bearer of the kind of memory the innovators detest. They are not gradualists. It has to go now.

Which revolution is he referring to? It could be any one of them. French, Russian, Chinese...(In fact it's something much closer to home.)

Actually one sees it sometimes in our daily life. Imagine an old company is bought by a fast-growing young company, and the "new broom" management team comes in with layoffs and re-structurings. They should, by logic, be carefully seeking-out and preserving the good parts of the "old régime" and its culture, but do you think that's going to happen?

Posted by John Weidner at April 3, 2007 7:21 AM
Weblog by John Weidner