Re: These people believe that myth and superstition -- and in their terms ie their myths and their superstitions -- must once again take precedence over common law and science and are thus intent on destroying the very cornerstones of our civilization and way of life.
It's hard to believe that this is actually going on in 2005.
The search for new commercial weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Doubletalk there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Laissezfaire. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance --meaning, in effect, war and police espionage-- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated.
The two aims of the Technocracy are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Technocracy is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. Insofar as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.
The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of opinion polls, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, bombshell news, advertising, and manipulations; or he is chemist, physicist, or geneticist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.
In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work.
Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future economic wars; others devise larger and larger dumpings, more and more powerful marketings, and more and more impassable trade barriers; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a financial vehicle that shall roam the world like a submarine under the water, or a foreign subsidiary as independent of its parent company as a spying-drone; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial financial upheavals and inflationary tidal waves by tapping the hidden face of international finance.
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Message 12958981 |
