Behind Every Glorious Facade There Is Always

Futurologists Have Been Multiplying Like Flies Since The Day Herman Kahn Made Cassandra's Profession "scientific," Yet Somehow Not One Of Them Has Come Out With The Clear Statement That We Have Wholly Abandoned Ourselves To The Mercy Of Technological Progress. The Roles Are Now Reversed: Humanity Becomes, For Technology, A Means, An Instrument For Achieving A Goal Unknown And Unknowable.

Man's Quest For Knowledge Is An Expanding Series Whose Limit Is Infinity, But Philosophy Seeks To Attain That Limit At One Blow, By A Short Circuit Providing The Certainty Of Complete And Inalterable Truth. Science Meanwhile Advances At Its Gradual Pace, Often Slowing To A Crawl, And For Periods It Even Walks In Place, But Eventually It Reaches The Various Ultimate Trenches Dug By Philosophical Thought, And, Quite Heedless Of The Fact That It Is Not Supposed To Be Able To Cross Those Final Barriers To The Intellect, Goes Right On.

Cripple God, Who Always Desires More Than He's Able To Have, And Doesn't Always Realize This To Begin With. Who Has Built Clocks, But Not The Time That They Measure. Has Built Systems Or Mechanisms That Serve Particular Purposes, But They Too Have Outgrown These Purposes And Betrayed Them. And Has Created An Infinity That, From Being The Measure Of The Power He Was Supposed To Have, Turned Into The Measure Of His Boundless Failure.

This Is Another Lie. We Are Only Seeking Man. We Have No Need Of Other Worlds. A Single World, Our Own, Suffices Us; But We Can't Accept It For What It Is. We Are Searching For An Ideal Image Of Our Own World: We Go In Quest Of A Planet, A Civilization Superior To Our Own But Developed On The Basis Of A Prototype Of Our Primeval Past.

Everything Is Explicable In The Terms Of The Behavior Of A Small Child.