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Quotation of the Day…

… is from pages 128-129 of Michael Huemer’s vitally important 2013 book, The Problem of Political Authority (link added; footnote excluded; emphases original):

The general precursors for the development of Stockholm Syndrome, then, are reasonably well satisfied in the case of citizens of modern states.  It is therefore not surprising to find that citizens tend to identify with their governments, adopt their governments’ perspectives, and develop emotional attachments (often considered ‘patriotism’) to their governments.  Just as Stockholm victims tend to deny or minimize their captors’ acts of coercion, many citizens tend to deny or minimize their governments’ coercion….  Due to the Stockholm dynamic, power has a self-legitimizing tendency: once it becomes sufficiently entrenched, power is perceived as authority.

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