Ashley Hebert’s Reviews > The Abolition of Man > Status Update

If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing.

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them.

Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.

…those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their impulses to another except the emotional strength of the impulse.

…what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism.

These past few pages have brought to mind Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily happy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.