Theodore Roszak Quotes

It will be enough to define the technocracy as that society in which those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge. And beyond the authority of science, there is no appeal.

"Technocracy," in The Meaning of Technology. Selected Readings from American Sources (2004) ed. Montserrat Ginés Gibert

In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the nontechnical man. Instead, the scale of intricacy or all human activities... transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts. ...even the most seemingly personal aspects of life. ...In the absence of expertise, the great [productive} mechanism would surely break down, leaving us in the midst of chaos and poverty.

Our goal should not be to borrow from elsewhere, but to search among our own cultural resources, perhaps even in modern science and industrialism, for ways to restore art to the status it has always held in traditional societies as a form of knowledge. ...art adds to what we learn from any combination of physics, biology, geology, and chemistry. It tells us the world is... deserving of reverence.

In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is to fill a book, a gallery, or a theater with joy, hope, and beauty.

That is what Castle's work needed: a beginner's eye—my eye, before it became too schooled and guarded, while it was still in touch with the vulgar foundations of the art, still vulnerably naive enough to receive that faint and flickering revelation of the dark god whose scriptures are the secret history of the movies.

The joy of this quest is not in triumph over others, but in the search for the qualities we share with them and for our uniqueness, which raises us above all competition.

In our time a secret manifesto is being written. Its language is a longing we read in one another's eyes. It is the longing to know our authentic vocation in the world, to find the work and the way of being that belong to each of u s . . . I speak of the Manifesto of the Person, the declaration of our sovereign right to self-discovery. I cannot say if those who have answered its summons are indeed millions, but I know that its influence moves significantly among us, a subterranean current of our history, that awakens in all those it touches an intoxicating sense of how deep the roots of the self reach, and what strange sources of energy they embrace....

Ideology is not absent in the technocracy... it is simply invisible, having blended into the supposedly indisputable truth of the scientific world view. ...The most effective ideologies are always those that are congruent with the limits of consciousness, for then they work subliminally.

The truth of the matter is no society, not even our severely secularized technocracy, can ever dispense with mystery and magical ritual.