Presented at the 2012 Mises Institute Supporters Summit: “The Truth About War: A Revisionist Approach”. Recorded at Callaway Gardens, Georgia, on 26 October 2012. Includes an introduction by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., and the awarding of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Defense of Liberty.
Music by Kevin MacLeod.
“I think it is correct to say that Western Civilization has collapsed; its creative, liberating, and humanizing foundations destroyed by the collective forces of institutionalized violence. American and European countries – long the seats of Western culture – are at the end of an entropic decline. At the same time, however, I have long suspected that we are in the early stages of a transformation in thinking that is producing major changes in how we live and work with one another in society. The vertically-structured systems of centralized authority are being replaced by horizontal networks that interconnect in decentralized, voluntary ways. The Internet – which has expanded the liberating and creative capacities inhering in Gutenberg’s invention – is the most visible expression of what I think of as the “unfolding civilization.”
“It is this social transformation that is the “terror” against which the institutional order now wars. As our world reorganizes itself into peaceful and productive systems that respect the inviolability of all persons, and relies upon spontaneous and informal processes for generating order; the political systems that now dominate mankind with their powers of death, destruction, imprisonment, torture, brutality, and other forms of violence, will lose their seductive powers. “
~Butler Shaffer
