Celine's Laws - by Hagbard Celine (via)
1. National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity.
2. Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation. (related, via)
3. An honest politician is a national calamity.
Related, from an interview with Robert Anton Wilson:
"Communication is possible only between equals. That’s the SNAFU Principle. I also call it Wilson’s Law. I hope that eventually it will get incorporated into sociology books. I really believe it. This came to me when I was working for Playboy, and realized that everything that was wrong with Playboy was due to the hierarchy there. I’d like to say that I predicted the decline and fall of the Hefner Empire, but I didn’t. I could see that communication was all screwed up because of the hierarchy, and then I thought of every other corporation I ever worked for, and armies and governments, and I realized that this is the situation in the authoritarian family, too. This is what women’s liberation is all about. Another big influence on the SNAFU Principle was Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. There’s a great sentence in there that goes roughly, „To the sheriff, Lucas was just another nigger and both the sheriff and Lucas knew it; but only one of them knew that to Lucas the sheriff was a redneck without any reason for pride in his forbears nor hope for it in his descendents.“ And that’s what hierarchy does: it creates a situation where the person on the top doesn’t know what the person on the bottom thinks."