" ... In fact, they are the most powerful men in the world, for one simple reason: they hold the keys to rational certainty. Everything they declare to be true will be accepted sooner or later by the whole population. There is no power in the world – economic, political, religious or social – that can compete with rational certainty."
-- Michel Houellebecq, Atomised
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"It’s easy to imagine a fable in which a small group of men – a couple of hundred in the whole world, at most – work intensively on something difficult, abstract, completely incomprehensible to the uninitiated. These men remain completely unknown; they have no apparent power, no money, no honours; nobody can understand the pleasure they get from their work..."
(1/2)
Peep Show is a national humiliation - UnHerd
https://unherd.com/2023/09/peep-show-is-a-national-humiliation/
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
-- William Shakespeare, The Tragedie of Macbeth
"Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions."
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
"Perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible" -- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
"The feeling that members of one’s own species deserve special moral consideration as compared with members of other species is old and deep.
[...]
Whether the ethic of ‘speciesism’, to use Richard Ryder’s term, can be put on a logical footing any more sound than that of ‘racism’, I do not know. What I do know is that it has no proper basis in evolutionary biology"
-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
"Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive."
-- Frank Herbert, Dune [The Ecology of Dune]
Power has poisoned academia - UnHerd
https://unherd.com/2022/12/power-has-poisoned-academia/