Quotation of the Day
13th December 2018
The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are being done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase in general education and average efficiency, the power now available for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man’s disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
— Wells, H. G. (Herbert George). The New Machiavelli
This feeling is the engine that drives every ideologue’s life, regardless of political orientation. We see it primarily in the activities of the proglodytes who are in charge of our world today, but it motivated Hitler and Mao, Lenin and Stalin, Robespierre and Napoleon.
In the modern industrialized and technologically advanced world, there is all this power sloshing around, that it is impossible for people (who think that the world not only could be a better place but ought to be a better place) to resist attempting to take that power into their hands (and the hands of those who agree with them) to remake that world in the image of the utopia they have in their heads. This is what is meant by the phrase ‘immanentizing the exchaton’, and it never works; but people are eternally trying, vowing ‘This time for sure!’