/lit/ - Literature

>If modern man does not recover his wholeness and balance, if he does not regain his creativity and his freedom, he will be unable to contain the destructive forces that are now conspiring, almost automatically, to destroy him; and even if they were held in check, he will, if he continues along the present route, in the end go completely out of his mind. It will require only a little further commitment to machines already in existence, a little further devaluation of the person, a little more contempt for life and the values of life, before modern man out of his boredom and purposelessness, if not out of destructive malice, will let loose his weapons of total extermination. He may do this, though everyone knows, as General Douglas MacArthur observed in 1945 and has lately said again, that there can be no victory for either side in a third World War. No victory and no peace. If our present state of unbalance continues, with “art degraded and imagination denied,” our present society, for all its powers of organization, will bring on its own downfall. Given a little more time, even a war would not be necessary to effect this negation of life. A congealed condition of enmity, a “deep-freeze war” prolonged for a generation, would be sufficient to produce the same result.

>Still the impulse, whether it has a base objective or a sound one, actually allows for qualities and human interests that were flatly disregarded under a purely quantitative ideology of the machine. As Emerson said when pianos were imported by Western mining towns, “the more piano, the less wolf.” So one may say of this new attention to the form and esthetic appeal of machine products, the more art can be integrated with the machine, the less need of art as a mere compensation. This is part of a more general humanizing influence that is beginning, even in the most mechanized spheres, to bring back a personal, I-and Thou relationship, as Martin Buber would call it, into realms hitherto mechanical, impersonal, not to say brutal.

>All this means that a Confucian, if not Christian, human-heartedness is coming back into even the most routinized factory or office; and men, instead of feeling excluded and belittled by the machine’s achievements, will increasingly feel released by them; so that all our mechanical operations, instead of being geared to produce the maximum quantity compatible with profit, will be geared to produce the maximum quantity compatible with a fully developed life for both the person and community. In such an order, we shall be able to curtail and simplify the products of the machine, not merely to elaborate, to expand, to multiply them. If necessary, we will dismantle our assembly lines in order to reassemble the human beings who have been harnessed to them.

-- LM/AaT

>>11851170
>schizophrenic copypasting obscurantist writing thread

i think this is just my preferred way of conducting my eclectic brand of shitposting on /lit/. if i'm reading a book or some philosopher who is just the jam, i'll make a thread with mostly bloc-quoted greentext + tumblr aesthetics or things cribbed from twitter for it. maybe it will help keep things thematic and if people are interested in reading book x or author y you can get a sneak peek at what they're talking about.

plus free obscurantist shitpost! it's good times.

>>11851269
ty anon. looking forward to it now. i'll probably make a new thread for it later-ish, otherwise the powers of Cosmotech will bend the space between the planes and become exiled to /his/.