KSS July eKourier 2023

NEV’S NOTES

NEV'S NOTES

Neville Kennard (1937 - 2012) Founder of Kennards Self Storage, enjoyed and was very passionate about expressing his ideas. These little gems have been appreciated by many in KSS. We will continue to publish his ideas that we have in stock. Enjoy!

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME AND OUR LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOVERNMENT

What is this about?

Why do the citizens identify with and protect those “guards and keepers” who hold them hostage with promises and threats? If one has been born in a kind of prison, and then been told that it is one of the best prisons around, that it is a bit better than this other prison across the water, much better than some prisons, especially those Communist prisons we hear of. And there are even people lining up to get into our prison and out of a much worse prison. Our prison has a nice flag, a national song and a pretty good football team. In our prison we get to elect our own guards, which we pay for, of course, but they do let us keep a fair bit of our own money. In our prison we can say what we like about our guards, and the inmates can’t do that in some of the other prisons we hear about on the other side of the world. Our prison has a proud history of reforms and we are better off than we were a few years ago. corrupt, and we resent the big bills they run up on overseas trips where they go to look at other prisons. But let’s face it, they are our guards, we chose them and elected them, and we pay them, so technically they work for us. And we are free to leave this prison anytime we like and go and find another prison. But the weather is nice in this prison, our families are here, we grew up here, we went to school here. Yeah, sure, some of our guards are useless and worse. Some are a bit

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“Stockholm Syndrome” refers to an event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973, when some bank robbers took captive a group of hostages and held them for six days while the robbers negotiated with the police. What happened was that the hostages developed an attach- ment to their captors, despite the fact they were held prisoner by them and their captors were criminals. The name Stockholm Syndrome was given to this paradoxical psychological phenomenon by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot who investigated the crime.

the strange attachment people have for their politicians?

Politicians are often held in rather low regard by the citizens of a country. They rank down there with car salesmen when surveyed on trust and respect. And yet there is also a strange attach- ment the electorate holds for these politicians, these guards and jailors who take the citizens’ money (in the form of taxes), spend it foolishly and wastefully, impose liberty-restricting regulations on their “captors” and they behave like lords and masters of the people who elect and pay for them.

September 10, 2010

Could the same phenomenon explain

18 Kennards Kourier July 2023