Cabinet of Curiosity

War touches not only the material life but also the thinking of nations...and here we meet again the basic notion that it is not the rational which manages the world but forces of affective, mystical or collective origin which guide men. The seductive promptings of these mystical formulas are all the more powerful in that they remain rather ill defined...immaterial forces are the true steerers of combat

With this new 'megatechnics' the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetery structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man's role, will be either fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organisations

Even those who stand out as revolutionaries are almost wholly the conventional products of the systems they overthrow. They speak the language, use the principles, and employ the practical skills and knowledge which society has given them. A small part of their behavior may be exceptional, possibly dramatically so, and we shall have to look for exceptional reasons in their idiosyncratic histories. (To attribute their original contributions to their miracle-working character as autonomous men is, of course no explanation at all

Those who had knowledge of the stars were more influential than the king's ministers, and foreign rulers consulted them frequently . Diodorus of Sicily (first century of the Christian Era) gives witness of their prestige: 'Having observed the stars during an enormous number of years' he says 'they know more precisely than anyone else the movements and the influences of the stars, and they predict with accuracy many things  to come'

If Facebook were deleted, I’d be deleted… All my memories would probably go along with it. And other people have posted pictures of me. All of the would be lost. If Facebook were undone, I might actually freak out… That is where I am. It’s part of your life. It’s a second you.” It is at this point that Audrey says of a Facebook avatar: “It’s your little twin on the Internet.

...secret knowledge has put an end to effective criticism and democratic control; the emancipation from manual labour has brought about a new kind of enslavement: abject dependence upon the machine. The monstrous gods of the ancient world have all reappeared, hugely magnified, demanding total human sacrifice...[and] whole nations stand ready, supinely, to throw their children into [their] fiery furnace

The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth. The age of the sign is essentially theological.

William James, a great admirer of Bergson, expressed a similar sentiment when he gave his presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research in 1896. On that occasion he acknowledged that '[o]ur debt to Science is literally boundless,' but equally maintained that '[s]cience has come to be identified with a certain fixed general belief, the belief  that the deeper order of Nature is mechanical exclusively, and that the non-mechanical categories are irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such a thing as human life.'

Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford anticipated Bergson when they argued in the 1880s that 'Reason' must be understood in its complete sense, and not taken to be merely 'the mutilated faculty which ordinarily passes for such, for that represents the intellect without the intuition' Similarly, Bergson insisted that it is necessary to 'superpose on scientific truth a knowledge of another kind which may be called metaphysical,' and asserted that it is this 'heightened' knowledge which gives access to 'reality itself, in the profoundest meaning of the word.' Bergson thus effectively displaced the analytical power of the intellect, and with it science ('a philosophy of intuition will be a negation of science'), as the best means of understanding 'Life as a whole'

Religion has its word, Science its promises and demonstrations, philosophy its systematized theories, art its creations and ideals, and yet these in their fundamental separations fall short of that Synthetical ideal which the Spirit of Humanity unceasingly demands. There remains always that perceptual cry of humanity, that plaint of a world in pain demanding apparently in vain some solution to the problem of existence. The answer of the ancient world to this cry of the Spirit of Humanity is to be found in the establishment of the Mysteries, as containing in their penetralia that which even the highest then known forms of religion had not, namely, a philosophico-religious reply resumed in Formulas and Ceremonies, to the problems of Life and Death, of Nature, of the Gods, of Spiritual Beings, etc., and lastly of the linking of these things as a whole back to the First Cause of all things

The inseparability of the ever-circulating repetitions of mechanical desires and the often illusory sense that our choices and decisions belong to us, as Tarde has already contended, make the social a hypnotic state: 'a dream of command and a dream of action' in which the somnambulist is 'possessed by the illusion that their ideas, all of which have been suggested to them, are spontaneous'

Comparable to some extent to the mass ideological apparatus of mind control, the imitative ray instills the feelings that we are originators of our own thoughts, beliefs and actions. This is not, however, a theory of persuasion that begins with a state of false consciousness so much as it brings together unconscious desires into a dream of command