#rigidity

Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn't understand stability. He's confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social leaders drool about stability constantly. It's their favorite word, next to 'power.' 'Gotta stabilize the political situation in Southeast Asia, gotta stabilize oil production and consumption, gotta stabilize student opposition to the government' and so forth. Stabilization to them means order, uniformity, control. And that's a half-witted and potentially genocidal misconception. No matter how thoroughly they control a system, disorder invariably leaks into it. Then the managers panic, rush to plug the leak and endeavor to tighten the controls. Therefore, totalitarianism grows in viciousness and scope. And the blind pity is, rigidity isn't the same as stability at all. True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#order #rigidity #stability #totalitarianism #totalitarianism

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal. ↗

— Pope Paul VI

#art #considered #crystal #deepest #devoid

The difference between management and administration (which is what bureaucrats used to do exclusively) is the difference between choice and rigidity. ↗

— Robert Heller

#between #bureaucrats #choice #difference #exclusively

Few things are more absurd than wise saws originally designed to inculcate or maintain the social needs of a society long past - when they are applied to today. ↗

— Idries Shah

#big-picture #lack-of-knowledge #lack-of-perspective #rigidity #design

Hair excited me. As the old ways - backcombing, rollers and rigidity - went out of the window, I started to feel the possibilities in front of my eyes. ↗

— Vidal Sassoon

#eyes #feel #front #hair #i

Wilhelm Reich identified "armor" as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, "deadness". Functionally identical to muscular armor (chronic muscular spasms) ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#contact #deadness #emotional #emotions #fear

I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn’t accept? ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#acceptance #dejan-stojanovic #faith #literature #literature-quotes

My mother has an incredible rigidity, which is very Catholic. ↗

— Manolo Blahnik

#incredible #mother #rigidity #very #which

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#control #democracies #exercised #ideological #indoctrination