hyperbanal

Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon — too soon before life itself.

Ancient Greeks had a word for it: Pleonexia, which is a disease that imagines there's nothing that money can't buy. Pleonexia is a desire for more, more of everything—more dancing girls, more cruise missiles, more floors on the building on the 57th Street, more circulation, more profit, in other words, more for the rich, less for everybody else, good luck and good bye.

The American vision of the world plays a great part in the origin of problems. That is why American novels remain interesting. They are the source of the problem, unquestionably.

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you.

They are vulgarizing mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie,

Hence, they [the men of letters] turned to the study of Greek and Roman authors, but not—and this is decisive—for the sake of whatever eternal wisdom or immortal beauty the ancient books might contain but almost exclusively in order to learn about the political institutions to which they bore witness. In eighteenth-century France, as in eighteenth century America, it was their search of public freedom and public happiness, and not their quest for truth, that led men back to antiquity.

Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. ... If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. Thee lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

Money, and not morality, is the principle of commerce and commercial nations.

No one has better illustrated the truth than Rimbaud, that the freedom of the isolated individual is a mirage. Only the emancipated individual knows freedom. This freedom is earned. It is a gradual liberation, a slow and laborious fight in which the chimeras are exorcised. The chimeras are never slain, for phantoms are only as real as the fears which call them forth. To know oneself, as Rimbaud once counselled in that famous Letter of the Seer, is to rid oneself of the demons which possess one. The Church did not invent these terrors of the mind and soul, nor does society create the restrictions which irk and plague one. One church is overthrown and another is set up; one form of society is abolished and another springs up. The powers and emanations persist. Rebels create only new forms of tyranny. Whatever man suffers as an individual all men suffer as members of society.

In every stage of civilization the condition of the common man has been anything but a civilized one. He has lived like a rat—through good epochs and bad ones. History was never written for the common man but for those in power. The history of the world is the history of a privilege few. Even in its grandeur it stinks.

But the “message” of computer technology is comprehensive and domineering. The computer argues, to put it baldly, that the most serious problems confronting us at both personal and public levels require technical solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable. I would argue that this is, on the face of it, nonsense. Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information. If a nuclear catastrophe occurs, it shall not be because of inadequate information. Where people are dying of starvation, it does not occur because of inadequate information. If families break up, children are mistreated, crime terrorizes a city, education is impotent, it does not happen because of inadequate information. Mathematical equations, instantaneous communication, and vast quantities of information have nothing whatever to do with any of these problems. And the computer is useless in addressing them.

Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.

Technocracies are concerned to invent machinery. That people’s lives are changed by machinery is taken as a matter of course, and that people must sometimes be treated as if they were machinery is considered a necessary and unfortunate condition of technological development. But in technocracies, such a condition is not held to be a philosophy of culture. Technocracy does not have as its aim a grand reductionism in which human life must find its meaning in machinery and technique. Technopoly does. In the work of Frederick Taylor we have, I believe, the first clear statement of the idea that society is best served when human beings are placed at the disposal of their techniques and technology, that human beings are, in a sense, worth less than their machinery. He and his followers described exactly what this means, and hailed their discovery as the beginnings of a brave new world.

We may recall here a remark made by Niels Bohr that bears on this point. He said: “The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth.” He meant to teach us, as have other wise people, that it is better to have access to more than one profound truth. To be able to hold comfortably in one’s mind the validity and usefulness of two contradictory truths is the source of tolerance, openness, and, most important, a sense of humor, which is the greatest enemy of fanaticism. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly better to have one profound truth, one god, one narrative, than to have none.