Tag: behavior

Although censorship is an unspeakable cruelty, and although it is very effective in the short and medium term, for some reason it does not seem strong enough to last. So it should be noted that there are limits even to the fullest censorship. Censorship cannot, for example, hide itself completely: there will always be at least one pair of eyes capable of identifying it. And that pair of eyes, even if gagged and punished, will have something with it that censorship cannot corrupt. In this, censorship is also treacherous to the censor, who, however astute and methodical he may be, can never hide his crime, which will be fatally exposed over time, since its effects are too evident. Thus we have that the censor, however delightful the momentary benefits may be to him, will have to face the fact that they are momentary, and eternal the reputation of a scoundrel that he has irrevocably attached to his name.

It is curious, to say the least, that laws are widely respected, when they are made by the same figures that, every four years, we see smiling on billboards, in electoral advertisements, and that, sporadically, we see in the police news handcuffed and arrested for leading scandals. In other words: the laws, conceived in the midst of the same mud responsible for sending some unfortunate ones to jail, are and must be respected as if they were a moral imperative. Undoubtedly, there is something comical in all this, and the obscenity with which the flock is enslaved and remains passive is laughable, when this pornography called law should more sensibly inspire a perennial state of revolt and insubordination.

There is a remarkable difference between having a “cause” and wanting to impose it on the rest of men. It is possible to say, at first, that this difference is character. But it can also be said that the more the feeling inspired by the “cause” is true, the more its “benefits” are clear in the mind of the one who has it, the more will be the natural impulse to want other men to have it too, or to “enjoy” it. Here, then, we come to the imposition. There is no way to interpret it, regardless of how it is practiced, or how it is founded, if not as a primary violation, a direct attack on the freedom of the individual. The imposition will never be noble, and after the tyranny has been perpetrated, those who have suffered it can no longer be called free men.