Status Updates From His Master's Voice

Those who said that civilization would always face certain necessities, in the form of limits to personal freedom, were in fact adherents of the naïve faith that the Cosmos was arranged not without thought to the “duties befitting” intelligent beings. This was a common extension of the Biblical injunction about working for one’s daily bread…It was not, as such naïve people often thought, an ethical judgment

“…the material gap widened between the Superpowers and the Third World—­a gap called by the economists an “expanding harmony.” Responsible personages, holding in their hands the fates of others, said that they realized that such a state could not go on indefinitely; but they did nothing, as if waiting for a miracle.”

“In the middle of the [20th] century a total fear paralyzed politics, but did not change it; the strategy remained the same. Days were put before months, years over centuries, but the reverse should have been done; the idea of seeing to the welfare of the species should have been written on the standards; the technological ascent should have been bridled, to keep it from becoming a fall.”

“…we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.”

“Yet we have grown accustomed to [nuclear weaponry], and people who calculate corpses times ten to the eighth, to the ninth, to the tenth—­no one considers them insane. Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.”

“Although [the Nazi] spoke to us, you see, we were not people. He knew that we comprehended human speech but that nevertheless we were not human; he knew this quite well. Therefore, even if he had wanted to explain things to us, he could not have. The man could do with us what he liked, but he could not enter into negotiations, because for negotiation you must have a party…equal to the party who initiates it”

He once read me an excerpt from a 19th century volume describing the raising of pigs trained to find truffles. …Availing himself appropriately of outlets here and there, the scientist-­pig—­explained Rappaport—­can then, without further distraction, devote himself to the hunting of truffles, for the benefit of the rulers but to the undoing of humanity, as indeed the new stage in history will demand of him.

“For him modernity was a destroyer of values, and technology an instrument of the Devil. If I exaggerate, it is not by much. He was convinced that the culmination of humanity had already taken place, long ago, possibly in the Renaissance, and that a long, accelerating downhill career had begun. …he took pleasure in contacts with people whom…present the greatest threat to our species; I mean politicians.”

This is so my jam it makes me blush to read it, endlessly manic academic clarifications of clarifications on the nature of language, it’s like Babel-17 meets Solaris but without all that pesky plot lol

“…what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?”

EL VERBO QUE SE HACE CARNE