----- Original Message ----- From: "Miles Jackson" <cqmv at pdx.edu>
Well, his argument is that the imputation of responsibility is an effective tool that the powerful use to control and punish the powerless. As andie notes, N's "deep" psychology calls into question our common sense notions that there is some unitary self/subject that is "responsible" for actions. For N, each of us is a tangle of impulses, instincts, habits, desires; upon this complexity we impose the fiction of the unified agent. I regret that Fred wasn't around to skewer the naive psychology of modern economics.
Miles
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Or the law-state complex, which is why anti-authoritarians and anarchists like him so much.
"A state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also, and this lie creepeth from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people'. It is a lie ! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. Destroyers are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state; they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them. Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs... But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth, and whatever it hath it hath stolen."