Economic development, with its apparently autonomous laws, its abstract purpose, its misunderstood contradictions, its unpredictable effects, was experienced by men, since it constituted a specific world, as a foreign destiny, alternately distributing prosperity and misery to them, and more often the latter. Yet this destiny drew its substance from their own lives, their work, their hopes and their suffering, even if, incomprehensibly, it turned their own efforts against them, to crush and enslave them. With technology, the autonomous character of development has ceased to be an appearance; it is a movement that has no relation to life, that asks nothing of it and brings it nothing, nothing that resembles it in any case, that conforms to its essence and its wishes. (Michel Henry)
Domination produces the people it needs, that is to say, who need it; and all the so-called conveniences of modern life, which make it a perpetual nuisance, are explained enough by this formula that the economy flatters the weakness of man to make the weak man its consumer, its obliged; its captive market that can no longer do without it: once the springs of his human nature are relaxed or distorted, he is incapable of desiring anything other than the devices that represent and take the place of the faculties of which he has been deprived. The supply of these devices becomes his inalienable and indefeasible right: together they are the quality of his being, the deprivation of which would undoubtedly destroy him. No faculty can be preserved if it is not exercised, and all are interdependent and so subordinate that none can be limited without the others being affected: the weakened man cannot imagine his existence otherwise, for the reason that the images projected to him as an accompanying booklet now take the place of an imagination of a possible life. (Baudouin de Bodinat)
To put it another way, as long as we do not admit that the modern world is far beyond us, that it is massively beyond our control, that nothing, or almost nothing, is on a human scale, that the freedom we are constantly being told about is a chimera, that unless we dismantle the dominant global social organization a return to societies on a human scale – a condition, but not a guarantee, of the existence of real democracies – none of the problems we face today will be solved, and we will essentially be talking for the sake of talking. (Nicolas Casaux)
The official press is a weapon of mass distraction: it must never talk about the real problems of the people or those of our time, but must know how to tell certain stories, as one does with children to put them to sleep. Consequently, on the one hand it censors, hides and manipulates reality, on the other hand it is obliged to create another one and to talk about this other reality to distract and hypnotize people. If someone, in a century or two, were to read today’s newspapers, knowing the true story of what is happening and the current risks and disasters that are brewing, they would have to conclude that the press at the beginning of the 21st century was completely schizophrenic, blind, separated from reality. In reality, it is neither blind nor schizophrenic. It’s just what it’s paid to do. (Gianfranco Sanguinetti)
It is when the luxuriance of life is impoverished that the schemers and the technicians with blueprints show their faces, emboldened; after which comes the moment when all that remains is to impoverish life even further, to declutter its planning. (Julien Gracq)
It is as if, in the space of ten years, we had returned to the Stone Age. Human types that we had thought had been extinct for centuries – the whirling dervish, the leader of bandits, the Grand Inquisitor – have suddenly reappeared, not behind the walls of an insane asylum but at the head of states. (George Orwell)
Rebounds: