Colin Bennett > Quotes

“How long, she asked, was this fraudulent stage-show called science to go on producing its 'closer and closer' approximations to an 'absolute and disinterested' truth? How long was the 'déception rationale', the con trick of objectivism to be practiced?”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“One thing is sure. Entertainment is important. Without it, the entire human race would go mad within a matter of hours.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Legitimacy is the perfect cover”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Brain is a temporary phenomenon in Nature. Performance is eternal.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“She cared for Britain. It took a lot for an Irish Catholic woman to say that. But she thought it was better to live in the agony of a permanent mental and physical cauldron than die slowly of television.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“The financial world as moral example, she thought. Well, wonders would never cease”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Cruelty could be designed-out. It's advertising is deficient.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“In love or pain, in joy and sadness, in loss and achievement, a Traveller along the Entertainment Leys joining these domains, these zones and points of sympathy, will therefore never ever be alone. Rod Stewart's cousin might be near, or Elton John's grandfather might have died just up the road. Be it suffering or transcendent joy, an Entertainment Traveller is held in an intercontinental web of healing glory which doesn't cost a penny, and has absolutely no concern for your previous moral life. Entertainment Priests are not deeply troubled men in nightshirts, most of whom have so many psychological problems before breakfast their personal depression nearly kills them promoting the comedown, the comeback, the punishment, the price to be paid at the toll gates of both sides of the schism. If the new Entertainment Priests are not fun, there is an absolute lock on their spiritual progress. They have to be Entertainers first and foremost, and they are to cast out of the temple the depressing landscape of fear and guilt and horrorof the Old Analogue Age, which was the pre-Entertainment Time. As Entertainment Citizens we will come to see that this past was a bleak landscape in which everything was poisoned, gassed, and strangled. It was a psychopath's world of tortured animals and old iron of industrial and scientific determinism. Now, like a billion-ton ice-pack, this spiritual hell is beginning a perceptible shift of paradigm into a landscape of purest Entertainment Legend.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Almost inconceivable, like an elf, fairy, or indeed effective resistance to the modern state.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“[The] staff of thirty-two men and twenty-five women, with their lavish planning, communications, and computer facilities, were paid for by a hardly detectable pinhead of a pattern within a mighty blizzard of Treasury accountancy-noise. The few very clever chappies who happened to come across this pinhead in their too-clever-by-a-half line of duty, tended to look at their lovely house and glowing family over the breakfast table, and think it might just be even more clever not to reveal their interesting discovery. Perhaps such stout fellows had made even more significant finds than this, and had decided that the night-side of a modern industrialised democratic nation was such an astonishing animal that it was best left to roam in the bush alone, quite invisible and undisturbed, a ghost whose occasional thumps in the night were best well ignored”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“All the great sages of history have made the same mistake. They think people want work, tasks, direction. What people really want is entertainment”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Create intellectual pornography. Make the accelerators bigger, the immensities more immense, the little things more little.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Human legs, Annie, are always too short, toes never fit, and people are thankfully almost always totally preoccupied with either subversion, defiance or escape.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Fort is amongst the most rare category of writers who are "political" because they make us aware of what is happening to us in the deepest sense. He points to a rediscovery of the waY THat fantasy -processes dtermine the perception of time, change, and indeed the creation and growth of fact and product in themselves. Thus he demonstrates the workings of that operational cargo cult which is modern techno-capitalism, and whose fuel is engineered mystique. The belief that the new experiments in the new laboratories will be an improvement on the old experiments in the old laboratories is a millenial promise worthy of any island cult of New Guinea, worshipping, as many there do, the skeletal rusting parts of the corpse of the American military machine of over fifty years ago. In this sense, Fort cautions us about scientific promises and expectations. No matter how hard the islanders try visualising the world that manufactured their "magical" bits of B-29 wings, they cannot visualise technological time and it's cost/resources spectrum. For them, any day scores of B-29s will land on the long-overgrown strip with tins of hamburgers for free. But the apple pie America that made the B-29 is gone with Glen Miller's orchestra , the Marshall Plan, and General McArthur's return to Bataan, while the far fewer (and much more expensive) B-52s of our own day are only seen as sky-trails in the high Pacific blue. In any case, landing on a grass strip in a B-52 would be suicide for the crew, and certain death also for many fundamentalist believers. If such a thing did happen, it would seem to be a wounded bird in great trouble, and if the watchers below were saying their prayers as it approached, so too would be the captain and his crew. As for the hamburgers, well, there might be some scorched USAF lunch-tins available after the crash, and when they were found, whole cycles of belief could be rejuvenated: McDonald's USAF compo-packs might become a techno-industrial packaged sacrament, indicating that whilst times might be hard, at least the gods were trying. Little do the natives know that some members of the crews of the godlike silver vehicles wonder what transformation mysteries the natives are guarding in their turn. The crews have some knowledge that is thousands of years ahead of the natives, yet the primitives probably have some knowledge that the crews have lost thousands of years ago, and they might wonder why these gods need any radio apparatus to communicate over great distances. Both animals, in their dreaming, are searching for one another”
― Colin Bennett, Politics of the Imagination: The Life, Work and Ideas of Charles Fort

“Eventually, with new Entertainment-dedicated technologies already on the horizon, the Warhol vision would come about, and everyone would have a show of their own. Eventually the old world would be cut quite loose. Performance Mirrors face to face, the shows would reflect one another until there was 'nothing but interviews, appearances, and acts. In full development, the whole industrial and technical base of contemporary society would be committed to support this new pyramid culture'.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“... the problem here is that in the 20th century we have lost the relationship between imagination and fact.”
― Colin Bennett, Looking for Orthon: The Story of George Adamski, the First Flying Saucer Contactee, and How He Changed the World

“Like any decent reconaissance agent, he had fought his way into trouble in order to fight his way out”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“... implicit political coercion now has its headquarters and operations deep in the quiet anonymous software systems of the planet.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Don't you ever imagine?"
"What's the imagination got to do with anything?"
"It's better than your ever increasing accuracies. They're as phoney as silicon boobs. Like proper tits, inaccuracies are much more entertaining.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Fascinated and frequently baffled colleagues would often listen to Fields with heads slightly to one side as he claimed that he did not accept any simple and obvious distinction between Life and Death ... he had been bequeathed a kind of universal machine rather than a particular personality ... he often astounded listeners by claiming that his present self had been reconstituted precisely for an historical moment in which his entire purpose and destiny was to reactivate an inherited philosophical machina. The purpose of this engine was to create what he called a Theology of Advertisements.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Quite hypnotising a somewhat popeyed circle, he declared that there was no such thing as fantasy. There was a scale of illusions, declared he, which could be more or less solid according to the way they were sold.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“...like the wing of the chaffinch, both the truth and authority have to undergo natural selection. The new meansof persuasion are to be as smoothly and stylistically designed as a 48-track digital tape studio, quiet as a Rolls, appealing as a glamorous face. From hot systems of social control, destructive of the environment, wasteful of sensitive and limited power systems, the progress is towards elegant and entertaining designer-systems of pressure and influence.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb