Quote of the day (Alan Watts)

"A community of people which is always watching itself through its agents, so that... you know in a Nazi state, there are not only the normal policemen on the beat, but there’s a block captain for every area, and there’s some kind of a sneak or a traitor who is going to inform the authorities everywhere you see, hidden. So this community is watching itself all the time, because it is a community that doesn’t trust itself."

"If I say now my right hand is my main active hand, and... But I don’t know whether I can trust it; I don’t know what it’s going to do. So I’ve got to keep control on it with my left hand… [See?] So always the left hand is controlling the right hand. [Whatever...] If I want to pick something up, the left hand would have to push the right hand down, and squeeze the fingers together, and then lift it up so it will come up. See, I’ve lost a hand by doing that. So in the same way, when any community of people is founded on mutual mistrust, it sort of loses half of itself. It becomes clutched up. It becomes paralyzed and becomes unable to move."

Also: Alan Watts audio clips (realaudio) and transcriptions available at Deoxy.org