Event #12

Mass lobotomies are usually successful: the intellectual vision entails a cost in terms of Energy consumption and sometimes traumatic emotional strain, because it sees fearful things we would rather not know: to begin with, the biological death sentence under which every animal is born. Hence the flourishing entertainment industry; hence the weight of interests defended by so-called dogmatic truths. The auto-da-fe or burning stake has modern and politically correct equivalents. The intellect requires constant maintenance: it does not take much to atrophy. The hypnosis of the screen and the monitor explains effects that are much more pervasive than those of the soul-carers of old: suffice it to mention the sermons by the friar Savonarola in the cathedral of Florence, or by John Calvin in Geneva—two technocrats of psychological subjugation. So thinking has a hard game to play against psychic inertia, a game that may be lost from the start but is still worth playing.