Excellent contribution [ as always :-) ] thx

All seems self-evident, though unfortunately that is not the case today in
so many spheres of endeavour. But, things change, albeit slowly.

"Immortalist" yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:0d362431-4acf-42f7-9924-aed5697b19b2@n33g2000pri.googlegroups.com...
Sometimes falsehoods and myths that are "common wisdom" can survive
indefinately simply because the prospect of exposing them is itself
rendered daunting or awkward by a taboo. An indefensible mutual
presumption can be kept aloft for years or even centuries because each
person assumes that somebody else has some very good reasons for
maintaining it, and nobody dares to challenge it. --Danial Dennett

Spinoza on Politics

...The last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain
them by fear; rather it is so to free each man from fear that he may
live and act with full security and without injury to himself or his
neighbor. The end of the state, I repeat, is not to make rational
beings into brute beasts and machines. It is to enable their bodies
and their minds to function safely. It is to lead men to live by, and
to exercise, a free reason; that they may not waste their strength in
hatred, anger and guile, nor act unfairly toward one another. Thus the
end of the state is really liberty.

Freedom is the goal of the state because the function of the state is
to promote growth, and growth depends on capacity finding freedom. But
what if laws stifle growth and freedom? What shall a man do if the
state, seeking, like every organism or organization, to preserve its
own existence (which ordinarily means that office-holders seek to keep
themselves in office), becomes a mechanism of domineering and
exploitation? Obey even the unjust law, answers Spinoza, if reasonable
protest and discussion are allowed and speech is left free to secure a
peaceful change. "I confess that from such freedom inconveniences may
sometimes arise; but what question was ever settled so wisely that no
abuses could spring therefrom?" Laws against free speech are
subversive of all law; for men will not long respect laws which they
may not criticize.

The more a government strives to
curtail freedom of speech, the
more obstinately is it resisted;
not indeed by the avaricious, . . .
but by those whom good education,
sound morality, and virtue
have rendered more free.

Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will
endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be
true should be counted crimes against the laws. . . . Under such
circumstances they do not think it disgraceful, but most honorable, to
hold the laws in abhorrence, and to refrain from no action against the
government. . . . Laws which can be broken without any wrong to one's
neighbor are counted but a laughing-stock; and so far from such laws
restraining the appetites and lusts of mankind, they rather heighten
them. Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimusque negata ["We always resist
prohibitions, and yearn for what is denied us."].

And Spinoza concludes like a good American constitutionalist: "If
actions only could be made the ground of criminal prosecutions, and
words were always allowed to pass free, sedition would be divested of
every semblance of justification."

The less control the state has over the mind, the better for both the
citizen and the state. Spinoza, while recognizing the necessity of the
state, distrusts it, knowing that power corrupts even the
incorruptible (was this not the name of Robespierre?); and he does not
look with equanimity upon the extension of its authority from the
bodies and actions to the souls and thoughts of men; that would be the
end of growth and the death of the group. So he disapproves of state
control of education, especially in the universities: "Academies that
are rounded at the public expense are Instituted not so much to
cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them. But in a free
commonwealth arts and sciences will be better cultivated to the full
if every one that asks leave is allowed to teach publicly, at his own
cost and risk." How to find a middle way between universities
controlled by the state and universities controlled by private wealth,
is a problem which Spinoza does not solve; private wealth had not in
his day grown to such proportions as to suggest the difficulty. His
ideal, apparently, was higher education such as once flourished in
Greece, coming not from institutions but from free individuals