Meditações - tempo, conceito abstracto, mas poderoso

In highly differentiated societies, in which everyone is linked to everyone else in long chains of interdependence, what in ‘simple’ societies is an external restraint – the necessity to obey certain norms which the mighty in society take upon themselves to enforce – is transformed into spontaneous loyalty to an internalized rule, into self-restraint, and it becomes difficult to behave otherwise than as the norm dictates. A long historical course following the alternating events of the civilization process leads to the apparent paradox that an abstract concept such as time can manage to exercise so great a control over personal and collective life.

Simonetta Tabboni