The function of writing is to explode one’s subject — transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations). - Susan Sontag

As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all to easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be “stimulated,” into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, “the man who unmasks his fictions” through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture “renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth.” There, he concludes, “no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.”

Most people will not question the rationalizations offered by their government for starting or continuing a war.

In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.