LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

In the Middle Ages they got a bit fantastic, got their eyes off the here
and now, and thought the bad idea would land a man in perdition, eternal
flames, purgatory, or whatever.
Then something got tangled, and the people got fanatic, and heretics
were burned and so forth. And M. Voltaire tried to get that untangled,
worked all his life against the cruelties of fanaticism, was called an
atheist; which he was NOT. I strongly suspect that almost no heretics
were burnt, at least not at the beginning, except those who interfered
with the usury racket, those whose ideas were seen as inimical to the
usury racket, leaving out the question. But so far as I know no research
has ever been done along these lines. I am speaking of heretics proper,
ideology, not people who went into witch persecutions.
The idea that a WRONG idea could damage people here and now was
perhaps not fully developed. The British theory was that free speech was
a blow hole. Let ’em TALK and they will DO nothing. Hyde Park
corner, etc.
Gus Flaubert and I myself, and diverse others, includin’ if you must go
so far back, Mencius and Confucius, saw something worse than just one
BAD idea, and that was the corruption of the whole and TOTAL means
of communication of all ideas whatsoever. The corruption of language,
the destruction of all precision in terminology, which takes man back
and down to the status of beasts, or what beasts are SUPPOSED to be;
namely, unable to communicate with one another.
Yet even animals, packs of wolves, and wild dogs do seem to under
stand each other, and to collaborate. Very well, I set up and gradually got
some ideas as to combat tin’ this universal gonorrhea of language and
this rotting of ALL Printed means of communication, monthlies, dailies,
weeklies, mercantilist publishing system.