My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.
Don DeLilloTags: paradox power belief connection destruction
There were no passing cars to call out to. You couldn’t call for help from a police car, anyway; he didn’t think you could.
Dorothy B. HughesTags: power racism police police-brutality
I had no idea what humans were capable of. I heard they were crafty, but how are they able to do such things?
You mean harness light and water? Speedy asked. Change the weather?
Yes.
It's only the beginning, Speedy said. There are more marvels waiting. Some not so marvelous.
Such as?
Be not in haste, said the tortoise.
There is nothing here but time.
If you live long enough, you will see.
Of course, though, you will see them from your cage.
Live long enough? I asked. Are there mortal dangers here?
The tortoise chuckled.
The boy doesn't always take very good care of his prisoners, Rex the lizard chimed in.
What do you mean? He doesn't feed us enough?
Sometimes he doesn't understand what we need to survive, Rex answered. Sometimes he plays too rough.
How can a creature able to bend the laws of nature be so cruel? I asked.
Tags: power ethics pets humans snake lizard reptiles tortoise
Life is all about love. Everything — hate, lust, money, power, death, birth — it all stems from love. If life were put in a giant pot and boiled like a piece of chicken, all the fat would melt away, and what you’d be left with is love.
J. Matthew NespoliTags: love power hate death lust birth broken
For to be wise and love exceeds man's might.
William ShakespeareAs the long limousine purred to life Edwina felt as if she were Elizabeth, setting sail to battle the Spanish Armada. She was Elizabeth, damn it! What she had built no one was going to take away from her. Not her house, not her hotels, not her fine stable of horses -- and most especially not the young thoroughbred she had left sleeping by the side of her Olympic-size outdoor pool. Some pleasures, she decided, were simply too enticing to give up.
Barbara Taylor BradfordWhite men are irresponsible with their power and money. Our beautiful earth is million of years old, and in a mere five hundred years, white people have nearly destroyed it. Another hundred years like the last hundred, and there won't be a living creature left on the planet.
-character Amber Johnson (Broken)
Tags: money power global-warming earth white-men
Maybe she had some sort of extraordinary quality, secret even to her. Maybe she did have the power to alter the things she'd always assumed she'd have to endure.
Anna NorthTags: power change change-the-world endure
Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life.
Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.
Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits.
The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.
Tags: science power technology government authoritarianism technics
To take command, one must first create the illusion that command is already yours.
Denise DomningTags: strength power command espionage trickery
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