A commercial civilization is money-oriented, profit-oriented. Commercial values always tend to wrench a society free of tradition.Economics from education to public service is being reorganized on the self-destructive basis of self-interest.

If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.

The best defence [for a democracy, for the public good] is aggressiveness, the aggressiveness of the involved citizen. We need to reassert that slow, time-consuming, inefficient, boring process that requires our involvement; it is called 'being a citizen.' The public good is not something that you can see. It is not static. It is a process. It is the process by which democratic civilizations build themselves.

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

An individual who stands out, or disagrees or takes risks is a danger to such systems and is effortlessly and, unconsciously sidelined.

Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not for changing the nature of the relationship.

The neo-conservatives, who are closely linked to the neo-corporatists, are rather different. They claim to be conservatives, when everything they stand for is a rejection of conservatism. They claim to present an alternate social model, when they are little more than the courtiers of the corporatist movement. Their agitation is filled with the bitterness and cynicism typical of courtiers who scramble for crumbs at the banquet tables of real power, but are always denied a proper chair.