Carroll Quigley: Life, Lectures, and Collected Works

The fundamental, all pervasive cause of world instability today is the destruction of communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neuroses and psychoses [...] another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, in Europe and in much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility [...] The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital. (p. 283)

out of the Dark Age that followed the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, came the most magnificent thing we have in our society: the recognition that people can have a society without having a state. In other words, this experience wiped away the assumption that is found throughout Classical Antiquity, except among unorthodox and heretical thinkers, that the state and the society are identical, and therefore you can desire nothing more than to be a citizen. (p. 231)

Now I come to my last statemen [...] I’m not personally pessimistic. The final result will be that the American people will ultimately [...] opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life — although I would assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The process of coping out will take a long time, but notice: we are already coping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a large scale basis [...] People are also copping out by refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what’s going on in the world, and by increasing their emphasis on the growth of localism, i.e.,what is happening in their own neighborhoods [...] When Rome fell, the Christian answer was, “Create our own communities.” (p. 289)