>These are facts of experience. Countless people alive today have passed the midpoint of the nihilistic process, the rock-bottom of the maelstrom. They have learned that the mechanism reveals its menacing nature all the more clearly there; man finds himself in the bowels of a great machine devised for his destruction. They have also learned firsthand that all rationalism leads to mechanism, and every mechanism to torture its logical consequence. In the nineteenth century this had not yet been realized.
>The panic so widely observable today is the expression of an emaciated spirit, of a passive nihilism that provokes its active counterpart. Of course, no one is easier to terrorize than the person who believes that everything is over when his fleeting phenomenon is extinguished. The new slaveholders have realized this, and this explains the importance to them of materialistic theories, which serve to shatter the old order during the insurrection and to perpetuate the reign of terror afterward. No basin is to be left standing where a man may feel unassailable and therefore unafraid.
>As we see, predicaments arise that demand an immediate moral decision, and this is most true where the vortex is deepest and most turbulent. This has not been, and will not always be the case. Generally speaking, the institutions and the rules associated with them provide navigable terrain; what is legal and moral lies in the wind. Naturally, abuses occur, but there are also courts and police. This changes when morality is substituted by a subspecies of technology, that is, by propaganda, and the institutions are transformed into weapons of civil war. The decision then falls to the individual, as an either-or, since a third position, neutrality, is excluded. From this point forward, a particular form of infamy lies in non-participation, but also in making judgments from a non-participating position.
>The panic so widely observable today is the expression of an emaciated spirit, of a passive nihilism that provokes its active counterpart. Of course, no one is easier to terrorize than the person who believes that everything is over when his fleeting phenomenon is extinguished. The new slaveholders have realized this, and this explains the importance to them of materialistic theories, which serve to shatter the old order during the insurrection and to perpetuate the reign of terror afterward. No basin is to be left standing where a man may feel unassailable and therefore unafraid.
>It is critical for the dispossessed individual to get beyond the idea of a personal theft perpetrated on him. Otherwise he remains with a trauma, a persisting inner sense of loss, which will later manifest in civil war.
>A very significant event here is philosophy’s turn from knowledge to language; it brings the spirit back into close contact with a primal phenomenon. This is more important than any physical discovery.
