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not for the individual. Reason does not tell us it is vital for the individual to be a citizen. On the contrary, the State is a curse for the individual. For what means has the prussian State built itself over force? Suffocating individuals in a geographical and political order of things. The best soldier is a hotel waiter. See, however, the jewish nation, chosen among the human race. How has it preserved its nobility, its peculiarities that isolate it, and its poetry, in the middle of the barbarities that surround it? Simply because it is not organized as a State. If it would have remained in Palestine, it would have suffered the same luck as the oppressed peoples under the social structure a long time ago. We must abolish the State! That revolution will have my approval. To fight the idea of the State, to represent the individual initiative and what concerns it in the psychic hierarchy/order, as the essential condition to every association, that is the beginning of a freedom that costs alot. Changing the forms of government, nothing is achieved but differences in rank, a little more or a little less, nothing that is meaningful. My friend, what's important is not succumbing to the antiquity of the institution. The state sinks its roots in time; but it rises for a limited term. Greater things fell; every religion will be disarranged. Neither the moral principles, nor the forms of art, have eternity unpon them. Deep inside, what do we have to conserve? Who can assure me that in Jupiter, two and two isn't five?
I don't want or can develop, furthermore, through a letter, these considerations. I wholeheartedly thank you for all your poetry...
Letter V
Dresde May 18, 1871
I have found out with joy in Coopenhaguen that you are completely recovered and, for a long time,
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