Proliferation

“ Recommendation: Our report shows that al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make weapons of mass destruction for at least ten years. There is no doubt the United States would be a prime target. Preventing the proliferation of these weapons warrants a maximum effort—by strengthening counterproliferation efforts, expanding the Proliferation Security Initiative, and supporting the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. Targeting Terrorist Money The general public sees attacks on terrorist finance as a way to “starve the terrorists of money.” ”

“ Calls upon Member States to take the measures necessary to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in all its aspects and to promote nuclear disarmament, with the objective of eliminating nuclear weapons ”

“ These being freed from the normal inhibiting power of the neighbouring elements, multiply and go on to the formation of a new growth. According to Ribbert it is the isolation, together with the latent capacity of isolated cells for unlimited proliferation, that gives rise to new growths. ”

“ In recent years the successful experimental transplantation of new growths, occurring sporadically in white mice and rats, into animals of the same species, has thrown a fresh light on all the features of malignant growths. From these experiments it is shown that cells taken from these growths and introduced into animals of the same species give rise to a cancerous growth, whose cells have acquired unlimited powers of proliferation. They are direct lineal descendants of the cells introduced, and are in no way formed from the tissue cells of the host in which they are placed and grow. ”

“ But the type of each society is continually being modified by two causes—by growth, and by the actions, warlike or other, of adjacent societies. Increase in the bulk of a society inevitably leads to change of structure; as also does any alteration in the ratio of the predatory to the industrial activities. Hence continual social metamorphosis, involving continual alteration of the conditions under which the citizen lives, produces in him an adaptation of character which, tending toward completeness, is ever made incomplete by further social metamorphosis. ”

“ No real progress can result from such petrifaction of the intellect; a fossil cannot grow. And the disease, as we have pointed out, exists in every department of life: in education, in government, in mechanics, in agriculture, in society. ”

“ That with social organisms, as with individual organisms, structure up to a certain point is needful for growth is obvious. That in the one case, as in the other, continued growth implies unbuilding and rebuilding of structure, which therefore becomes in so far an impediment, seems also obvious. Whether it is true in the one case, as in the other, that completion of structure involves arrest of growth, and fixes the society to the type it has then reached, is a question to be considered. ”

“ By evolution must be understood the transformation that takes place day by day, which is almost unnoticed, but continuous and inevitable; by revolution, the critical and decisive period, more or less prolonged, of an evolution that has reached its concluding phase; by rebellion, the partially collective violence which breaks out, upon the occasion of some particular circumstance, at a definite place and time ”

“ The good and evil results that flow from any act, even the smallest, breed on and on, century after century, forever and ever and ever, creeping by inches around the globe, affecting all its coming and going populations until the end of time, until the final cataclysm! ”

“ It was an age in which the whole system of society was in a state of convulsion, in which whatever was antiquated, contracted, or rotten, was severed and thrown down; and the seeds of a thousand new things thrown into the upturned soil, already showed those vigorous germs and shoots which have ever since been growing and ripening into a country and a moral and political condition which have no parallel. ”

“ The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre and structure of society. ”

“ Just where will come the outbreak after three centuries of mind-repression and soul-distortion, of forcing a growing subject into the strait-jacket of medieval thought and action, of natural selection reversed by the constant elimination of native initiative and leadership, is indeed a curious study. ”

“ A strange progress, indeed, is that which consists in curtailing everywhere the grand superfetations nature has bestowed upon us, so that whenever we discover them in all their virgin splendour, they are a revelation to us. ”

“ We grow our wheat, our fruit, and our animals, There they are organized, they increase and grow; but, after a while, they decay, dissolve, become disorganized, and return to their mother earth. No matter by what process, these are the revolutions which they undergo; but the elements of the particles of which they were composed, still do, always have, and always will exist, and through this principle of change, we have an eternal increase. ”

“ An unexplained residuum of change, perhaps a large one, must be left to the assumed uniform action of those unknown agencies, which occasionally induce strongly-marked and abrupt deviations of structure in our domestic productions. ”

“ The incessant growth of society, the increase of its wants, the development of its ideas, render the long continuance of such a state of affairs impossible; and it may prelude, according to the conditions of the time, either some violent outbreak of a neglected and suffering people, or some manifestation of national energy in the direction of material and intellectual progress. ”

“ No doubt the numerous local disturbances above mentioned have frequently broken the chain of created beings; but a gradual progress from related to related forms, a continuous development from lower to more highly organised species, genera, orders, and classes, has from the beginning been the general and constant law of organic life. Universal destructions of existing forms, revolutions covering the whole surface of the earth with ruin, have most assuredly never occurred in the annals of our globe. ”

“ It is that inherent tendency of the social organism to generate the causes of its own destruction, never yet counteracted, which has been at the bottom of half the catastrophes which have ruined States. ”

“ Or again, if the political structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by growth, the expansive forces of social and economic transformation may rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French Revolution. ”

“ A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death. ”

“ The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings and recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling of spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years, giving rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and everywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the race to aid them, into every available region of the earth. ”

“ By social change is meant those rapid mutations which accompany sudden interferences with the equilibrium of society, break up the status-quo, dissipate mental inertia and overturn other tendencies resistant to structural modification. The various forces which initiate such disturbances are factors in social change. These factors may be intra-social,—within the group—such factors as operate in the regular social process, imitation and adaptation, for example; or they may be extra-social, “stimuli” factors—from without the group—such as, accidental, extraneous or dramatic events. ”

“ In the prosecution of such a subject, besides tracing the development of those little causes which, in former days, have spread their effects from man to man, until whole communities have laboured under a disease resulting in revolutions of the most stupendous nature, we should, doubtless, perceive many of those points of susceptibility and chains of impulsion, which render men the creatures of change ”

“ But this system of the free town contained in itself, as does every other institution, the seed of death— contained it in that expanding element which developes, ripens, rots, and finally dissolves all living organisms. ”

“ A growth of new vital force—which yet was not a growth—everything pointed the other way, let me say a stock, was to be grafted into the decaying and wasting organism, permanent in its character, constant, without flux or reflux. ”

“ Development of the militant type involves increasing rigidity, since the cohesion, the combination, the subordination, and the regulation, to which the units of a society are subjected by it, inevitably decrease their ability to change their social positions, their occupations, their localities. ”

“ In addition, a social status contrary to nature, and a bad political régime effected the destruction of the strongest, the extermination of the best and the ascendancy of the worst elements of the population. ”

“ Once more, change in the average mode of life pursued by a society, now increasingly warlike and now increasingly industrial, initiates metamorphoses: changed activities generate changes of structures. Hence, there have to be distinguished those progressive rearrangements which belong to the further development of one social type, from those caused by the commencing development of another social type. ”

“ The phenomenon of that great fermenting putrefying country was more like some huge cataclysm of nature, some monstrous convulsion of the elements, than any ordinary political movement, so that anger and contempt were softened into pure amazement as the gradual dissolution of the vast organism took place from week to week before a wondering world. ”

“ But without soaring to the stars, the moment that this theory of progression, which seems so natural to us amid an advancing civilization, looks around the world, it comes against an enormous fact—the fixed, petrified civilizations. ”

“ Besides these natural causes of population and depopulation (which proceed, as we have observed, from a certain turn given to the spirit of a people) there are others which operate with irresistible force, by sudden and violent revolutions. ”

“ The individual unit is more and more restricted to the narrow lines of growth of differentiation and specialization in which the individual is sacrificed to society and the state, and generally to the progressive development of the social organism,—as the phrase runs. Such societies, from the very nature of the course taken by their evolution, tend towards decay, death, and final dissolution. ”

“ Unless preventive measures against the progressive increase of the defective classes are adopted, such a calamity as the gradual eclipse, slow decay and final disintegration of our present form of society and government is not only possible, but probable. ”

“ Let a change be produced, and it will show itself in one of the sides or one of the aspects of the empirical complexus, or in all of these within a longer or a shorter time; for example, the state extends its boundaries, or changes its internal limits as regards society by increasing or diminishing its powers and its attributes, or by changing the mode of action of one or the other ”

“ The first effect is to divert Nature’s force from the consolidation of faculties already fully formed, and, second, to injure the substantial growth of the later faculty, which is thus prematurely brought forward. ”

“ Nay, insignificance itself may confer a vital advantage. When adaptation takes the direction of greater simplicity of organization, as is seen, for example, in the typical parasite, we term the process one of degeneration. ”

“ Conclusion Recapitulation—The various steps in the study presented in propositional form—The rôle of catastrophe direct and indirect. (a) Directly prepares the ground-work for change by: (1) weakening social immobility; (2) producing fluidity of custom; (3) enhancing environal favorability for change— (b) Indirectly sets in motion factors determining the nature of the change such as: (1) the release of spirit and morale; (2) the play of imitation; (3) the stimulus of leaders and lookers-on; (4) the socialization of institutions. ”

“ If social evolution proceed according to natural law, if it be the outcome of the class struggle, waged unceasingly as part of the natural order of things, then acute revolution is no more than a special case of chronic revolution, and our estimate of acute revolution must be revised. ”

“ And, obviously, the working of this process is such that as many will continue to live and to reproduce as can do so under the conditions then existing: if the assemblage of influences becomes more difficult to withstand, a larger number of the feebler disappear early; if the assemblage of influences is made more favorable, by the removal of, or mitigation of, some unfavorable influence, there is an increase in the number of the feebler who survive and leave posterity. ”

“ Why did they rise from small beginnings, develop into wide-spread colossal complexes of wealth and power, and then, after longer or shorter periods of existence, break up and disappear from the stage of social history? ”

“ Wars, plagues and famines are bred from the unwisdom of over-population, for whereas the over-production of mites in a cheese do rot the cheese, so doth the over-production of human units rot the world. ”