Home > Work > The Australian Disease: On the Decline of Love and the Rise of Non-freedom
1 " Do we trust the idea of love, no matter how mad – from Don Quixote’s love for the farm girl he renames Dulcinea del Toboso to Yossarian’s love for the chaplain – because in the face of conformity, the madder the love, in some mysterious way the greater the commitment to freedom? "
― Richard Flanagan , The Australian Disease: On the Decline of Love and the Rise of Non-freedom
2 " Non-freedom to the Western mind is inevitably linked with images of backwardness – Soviet tractors, East German Trabants, Kim Jong Il’s haircut. But non-freedom these days is also iPads, iPhones and a dazzling array of less iconic but ubiquitous consumer goods that flood our stores, our homes and which increasingly are used to define our ideas of worth and happiness. It is a full-lipped smile achieved with the aid of collagen made from skin flensed from dead Chinese convicts. "
3 " The inescapable lesson of history is that any power given to the state – even when well meaning in intent – will ultimately be abused by the state. Like freedom, non-freedom does not arrive ready-made. It grows, and no soil should ever be made ready for its sowing. "
4 " There are so many forces in the world that divide us deeply and murderously. We cannot escape politics, history, religion, nationalism – for their sources lie as deep in our hearts as love and goodness, perhaps even deeper. In a world where the road to the new tyrannies is paved with the fear of others, we need to rediscover that we are neither alone, nor in the end that different, that what joins us is always more important than what divides us, and that the price of division is ever the obscenity of oppression. "
