one's need for the power process through surrogate activities
or through identification with an organization, rather then through
pursuit of real goals.
THE MOTIVES OF SCIENTISTS
87. Science and technology provide the most important examples of
surrogate activities. Some scientists claim that they are motivated by
"curiosity," that notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on
highly specialized problem that are not the object of any normal
curiosity. For example, is an astronomer, a mathematician or an
entomologist curious about the properties of
isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not. Only a chemist is curious
about such a thing, and he is curious about it only because chemistry
is his surrogate activity. Is the chemist curious about the
appropriate classification of a new species of beetle? No. That
question is of interest only to the entomologist, and he is interested
in it only because entomology is his surrogate activity. If the
chemist and the entomologist had to exert themselves seriously to
obtain the physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their
abilities in an interesting way but in some nonscientific pursuit,
then they couldn't giver a damn ab
out as planned.
109. The American Revolution does not provide a counterexample. The
American "Revolution" was not a revolution in our sense of the word,
but a war of independence followed by a rather far-reaching political
reform. The Founding Fathers did not change the direction of
development of American society, nor did they aspire to do so. They
only freed the development of American society from the retarding
effect of British rule. Their political reform did not change any
basic trend, but only pushed American political culture along its
natural direction of development. British society, of which American
society was an off-shoot, had been moving for a long time in the
direction of representative democracy. And prior to the War of
Independence the Americans were already practicing a significant
degree of representative democracy in the colonial assemblies. The
political system established by the Constitution was modeled on the
British system and on the colonial assemblies. With major alteration,
to be sure - there is no doubt that the Founding Fathers took a very
important step. But it was a step along the road the English-speaking
world was already traveling. The proof is that Br
That was a forged post by a USENET vandal known as "hipcrime". Dippy
hates USENET, and especially it hates news.admin.net-abuse.email, so
it wrote a piece of abuseware known as "newsagent" that allows it to
forge supercede posts and force follow-ups to flood NANAE with
thousands of "WTF" posts such as yours.
What to do about it is simple. First, look at the headers of a few
forged posts, and filter on the commonly identifiable elements. Lately
dipy's been abusing news servers in northern Europe. If you subscribe
to a service such as Supernews, the filtering is already done for you.
Second, if you feel you NUST reply to a dippyspew post, look very
carefully at where the post will be sent before you send it. This will
ensure that you don't accidentally pollute another group thus doing
dippy's vandalism for it. Third, now that you're immune to this id10t,
join in the defense by posting a message similar to this one whenever
you see a dippyspew in your newsgroup. The more people who know about
dippy, the less damage it can do.
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