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The Forum > Article Comments > Autonomy or automatons? (or 'autonomy anomaly'?) > Comments

Autonomy or automatons? (or 'autonomy anomaly'?) : Comments

By Paul Russell, published 18/4/2013

The Queensland Law Reform Commission wants this ability for the doctor to vary/ignore/override a written directive to be removed.

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Basic decency again. Thank you to Mr Russell LLB.

The very autonomous and the very comfortable "childless men who have forgotten their childhood" autonomy theorists are at best tools of a system pegged at the very beginning of modern democracy by the greatest analysts of democracy we have, Alexis De Tocqueville. A system age old, decrepit and only functioning to multiply the functionaries in control of every aspect of human life. It is an easy matter today to get an idea of how to live by doing and thinking the opposite of what the mouth of the elite - the ABC - select as news and of 'progressive' [sic] importance.

"It seems if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day…it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them….I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls….Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated…..It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood….The sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules….it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevent things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."
Posted by Martin Ibn Warriq, Thursday, 18 April 2013 3:46:38 PM
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