When the titanic apparatus of the mass-order has been consolidated, the individual has to serve it, and must from time to time combine with his fellows in order to renovate it. If he wants to make his livelihood by intellectual activity, he will find it very difficult to do this except by satisfying the needs of the many. He must give currency to something that will please the crowd. They seek satisfaction in the pleasures of the table, eroticism, self-assertion; they find no joy in life if one of these gratifications be curtailed. They also desire some means of self-knowledge. They desire to be led in such as way that they can fancy themselves leaders. Without wishing to be free, they would fain be accounted free. One who would please their taste must produce what is really average and commonplace, though not frankly styled such; must glorify or at least justify something as universally human. Whatever is beyond their understanding is uncongenial to them.
One who would influence the masses must have recourse to the art of advertisement. The clamour of puffery is to-day requisite even for an intellectual movement. The days of quiet and unpretentious activity seem over and done with. You must keep yourself in the public eye, give lectures, make speeches, arouse a sensation. Yet the mass-apparatus lacks true greatness of representation, lacks solemnity.Karl Jaspers
In the life of the mass-order, the culture of the generality tends to conform to the demands of the average human being. Spirituality decays through being diffused among the masses when knowledge is impoverished in every possible way by rationalisation until it becomes accessible to the crude understanding of all.
Karl Jaspers
To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realized as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.
Joseph Goebbels
Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with … Renan’s verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity. … The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim the intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of concrete advantage.
Julien Benda
Tesla, with his almost preternatural insight into alternating current phenomenon that had enabled him some years before to revolutionize the art of electric power transmission through the invention of the rotary field motor, knew how to make resonance serve, not merely the role of a microscope to make visible the electric oscillations, as Hertz had done, but he made it serve the role of a stereopticon to render spectacular to large audiences the phenomena of electric oscillations and high frequency currents....He did more to excite interest and create an intelligent understanding of these phenomena in the years 1891-1893 than anyone else, and the more we learn about high frequency phenomena, resonance, and radiation today, the nearer we find ourselves approaching what we at one time were inclined, through a species of intellectual myopia, to regard as the fascinating but fantastical speculations of a man whom we are now compelled, in the light of modern experience and knowledge, to admit was a prophet. But Tesla was no mere lecturer and prophet. He saw to the fulfillment of his prophesies and it has been difficult to make any but unimportant improvements in the art of radio-telegraphy without traveling part of the way at least, along a trail blazed by this pioneer who, though eminently ingenious, practical, and successful in the apparatus he devised and constructed, was so far ahead of his time that the best of us then mistook him for a dreamer. I never came anywhere near having an appreciation of what Mr. Tesla had done in this art until a very late date...
Nikola Tesla
There is an inborn tendency to be Free. Every being is struggling to be Free. No one wants bondage. No one wants misery. The very idea of disease and death is appalling to all. Still, a being thinks that it will be happy by sense-pleasures. Can these sense-pleasures make one happy? No. Any amount of sense-pleasures will not make one really happy. Sense-pleasures will bring momentary satisfaction and then make one unhappy. Then comes the question: Where does this real happiness lie? It lies in knowing the True Nature. To know your True Nature, you have to control your mind. In order to control your mind, you have to live a true life. You must be a man of good character. That is why all the Scriptures ask their followers to be good, kind, gentle, noble, charitable, truthful, etc. In fact, moral and ethical codes of good conduct are the starting points of all Religions. They start with moral and ethical codes and end with God-realization or Self-realization.
Swami Narayanananda
Jaspers, Karl
Jastrow, Robert
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