Philip Sherrard

“...we demean ourselves and our potentialities When we take an unrelievedly pessimistic view of our fate. Yet equally we demean ourselves when we nourish ourselves on illusions. The social and cultural order that we have built and are continuing to build about us—our present—is one predominantly determined by the categories of a false philosophy and its practical application; and the consequence of our acquiescence on such a mass scale to what amounts to a lie about ourselves and the true nature of the physical world cannot but be an increasing divorce between this order and that of the human and natural norm. In fact, this divorce has now become so great that it is virtually impossible for the one to understand the other. We have all but lost the capacity to measure how far we have in fact fallen below the level of the human and natural norm.”
― Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science

“If efficient technical means for achieving something exist or can be produced, then these means must be put into action irrespective of what this thing is or of what the cost may be in human terms. Even those who were at first the victims of these processes—the industrial proletariat—have been seduced by their glamour and regard them as the magical talisman that will bring them all they need in life. As for the elite of our technocracy—those who manipulate its inexhaustible gadgetry of machines, devices, techniques, the computers and cybernated systems, the simulation and gaming processes, the market and motivational research, the immense codifications necessary to sustain and enlarge their empire of sterilized artificiality—their prestige is virtually unassailable because on them the whole edifice depends for its survival and prosperity. Moreover, if they are readers of Teilhard de Chardin, they can add ideological grist to their pragmatic mill, for he will have taught them that it is through the consolidation of the ‘noosphere’, that level of existence permanently dominated by the mind of man and its planning, that our species will execute its God-given task and fulfill its destiny.”
― Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science