Rose Wilder Lane Quote

The basis of all this thinking is ignorance of creative energy; it is ignorance of the real nature of human beings; it is the ancient, pagan superstition that Authority controls a static, limited universe. This belief is at least six thousand years old. Acting upon this belief, human beings have tried every one of these ideas now advanced as revolutionary, and many more; they have tried every conceivable way of making a human world in which human energy can work at its natural job of making this earth habitable for human beings, and never in one of those centuries have they succeeded (with that pagan belief) in using their energies well enough to get them all enough to eat. Yet they keep on trying, because individuals control human energy in accordance with their religious faith, whatever it may be. And belief in Authority controlling a fixed, limited, changeless universe is the pagan religion. If this belief were true, then a human world controlled by some kind of human Authority would work. Then such a world would have worked, at least once, at least fairly well, during six thousand years of efforts to make it work. It does not work, for the same reason that a perpetual-motion machine will not work, because the attempt to make it work is based on a false belief, and not on fact.