If wars are due to the accumulation of the critical mas of power, and the critical mass of power can accumulate only in social organisms of critical size, the problems of aggression, like those of atrocity, can clearly again be solved in only one way – through the reduction of those organisms that have outgrown the proportions of human control. As we have seen, in the case of internal social miseries, already cities may constitute such overgrown units. In the case of external miseries, only states can acquire critical size. This means that, if the world is to be relieved of some of the pressures of aggressive warfare, we can do little by trying to unite it. We [w]ould but increase the terror potential that comes from large size. What must be accomplished is the very opposite: the dismemberment of the vast united national complexes commonly called the great powers. For they alone in the contemporary world have the social size that enables them to spread the miseries we try to prevent but cannot so long as we leave untouched the power which produces them. … where there is a critically large volume f power, there is aggression, and as long as there is critical power, so long will there be aggression. —Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 18:33:36 +0000
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