Excerpt from a BBC interview with the legendary Kurt Vonnegut, first broadcast on April 4, 1970.
Since I’ve been over here, a number of people have asked me, rather hopefully, if America is about to collapse, you know, and they want something else built on the foundations, as the young people do. But part of the American tragedy now is that we have constructed a collapse-proof government, and nobody should build that sort of thing. When you say that, can you be more explicit? What do you mean? It does not have to respond, and it’s so enormously strong and impersonal now that it can’t respond. And I think, for instance, the framers of the Constitution envisioned a government which could be overthrown under certain circumstances, and they encouraged people to think of overthrowing it in case it ever became unjust. But now it is so dependent on machinery. As you, you know, you must overthrow computers, you must overthrow great machines, institutions rigged like machines, and it can’t be done.
Source: BBC Archive