The Soul Of The Marionette

Usual bracing bleakness. A good set of sources and observations on progress, free will, science and rationalism. Overall, not a lot to argue with in his central contention that it’s an act of hubris to assign meaning to the world.

Struggling to escape from the world that science has revealed, humanity has taken refuge in the illusion that science enables them to remake the world in their own image.

Devaluing the natural world for the sake of a spiritual realm, Christianity could not be other than hostile to happiness:

Modern rationalism renews the central error of Christianity– the claim to have revealed the good life for all of humankind.

Either way there was no expectation that any fundamental alteration in human affairs could occur in the course of history. Taken for granted in the ancient world, this view of things is nowadays close to being incomprehensible.

Along with mass incarceration, torture appears to be integral in the functioning of the world’s most advanced state. It may not be accidental that the practice is often deployed in the special operations that have in many contexts replaced traditional warfare.

Unable to face the prospect that the cycles of war will continue, they are desperate to find a pattern of improvement in history. It is only natural that believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt, should turn to the sorcery of numbers.

If an earlier burst of technological advance left behind a lumpenproletarian underclass, the current wave looks set to create a lumpenbourgeoisie.

The more fragmented world that existed in the past was more stable than the interconnected world that exists at present,

The belief that there is some hidden cabal directing the course of events is a type of anthropomorphism– a way of finding agency in the entropy of history. If

Interpreting history as the work of a conspiracy is a backhanded compliment to human rationality.

If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect.

However it ends, the Anthropocene will be brief.

Much of our lives is passed in sleep; when awake we are possessed by half-forgotten dreams. Far from the mind being always conscious of its activities, much of what the mind does goes on unknown to it.

for the present and the future that can be clearly foreseen, it is only the freedom that can be realized within each human being that can be secure.

This is the truth in the Genesis myth: the Fall is not an event at the beginning of history but the intrinsic condition of self- conscious beings.

Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need. Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. Instead of becoming an unfaltering puppet, you will make your way in the stumbling human world. Über- marionettes do not have to wait until they can fly before they can be free. Not looking to ascend into the heavens, they can find freedom in falling to earth.