 Greetings, friends. I know almost nobody cares about books out there on YouTube, and I can tell that by the selected readings that I've shared with all of you. Essentially zero response on any of them. Dozens and dozens of videos. I've taken excerpts and short stories and poems and I can tell none of my audience here on YouTube likes any of it. They reject it. You reject everything I've read and judging by the stats too, you're not even watching it. If you click on it, the average view duration is like 15 seconds or something. You're not even listening. So I'm not going to be deterred. I'm not going to be running fear from the crowd mentality that says this is useless and worthless and pointless. Instead, since I've come up with a great selection today from Thomas Merton, this conjectures of a guilty bystander written 1967. There are some selected readings. First of all, this book is so good. It's on one of my top 20 best non-fictions of all time. This is absolutely up there of one of the best non-fictions. Now, Thomas Merton's non-fictions are all great. This is one of his very best and one of his last at that. He's writing it as most mature. So I'm going to share with you a selection from conjectures of a guilty bystander. Even though I know there'll probably be nobody out there who likes it or cares or is grateful that I've shared or brought your attention to this amazing writer, but I'm still going to share it because it needs to be said it's really important even for our time right now in this very day. It's important. And so I'm going to share it for maybe only for one person. Hopefully that there will be at least one person out there who this will reach and this will affect and will benefit from this reading. Okay. So that's why I'm reading these things. I know they're not huge crowd pleasers. These are for the very minority of the audience who are contemplatives or deep thinkers, right? Essentially, I've just erased most of the YouTube audience right in those two terms. It's like, oh, really deep thinker gone. Audience gone. Okay. Well, I'm still going to share this because it needs to be shared. This is Thomas Merton conjectures of a guilty bystander published by New Directions, who published all of his stuff pretty much well, maybe not all, but he posted, he published first in a lot of journals and stuff, but later on it was all here. And this is from the chapter truth and violence and interesting era. Let me just read you the chapters first. Look how attractive this book is part one, Barth's dream. Who's Barth? Well, you'll find out about that fascinating chapter. Part two, truth and violence and interesting era. That's where this is from. Part three, the ninth spirit and the dawn air, just some amazing writers. And he does reflections on other writers throughout this whole book. Part four, the fork in the road. Part five, the madman runs to the east. It's a brilliant book. It's so deep, it'll just get all your thoughts flowing for sure. So here's just a selection, a paragraph or so, maybe, maybe two sections from truth and violence and interesting era. Here we go. Certainly, America seems to have lost much in World War II. It has come out a bloated, suspicious, truculent militarist and one who is not without paranoid tendencies. Yet there are in America also fully alive and fully creative some of the best tendencies of European independence and liberal thought. No matter how we may criticize Europe and America, they are still in full strength. And in their liberty, liberal minority, the hope of the future still lies. Our ability to see ourselves objectively and to criticize our own actions, our own failings, is the source of a very real strength. But to those who fear truth, who have become to forget the genuine Western heritage and to become immersed in crude materialism without spirit, this critical tendency presents the greatest danger. Indeed, it must be seen. Indeed, it must seem perilous to those who cultivate a simultaneous complacent certitude of might and right in order to destroy without hesitation the ideological enemy. Wait until we have completely lost our European humor from which American humor is derived. And we will be in a posture to blast Russia or China quite seriously off the face of the earth, unable to see the grim joke that in so doing, we are also destroying ourselves and anything good that was left for us to save by war. It is precisely the dogmatic humorlessness of the self-designated realists that is the greatest danger. They are the ones who have shrugged off practically all that was left of Europe in our society. I, for one, mean to preserve all the Europe that is in me as long as I live and above all I will keep laughing until they close my mouth with fallout. The central problem of the modern world is the complete emancipation and autonomy of the technological mind at a time when unlimited possibilities lie open to it and all the resources seem to be at hand. Indeed, the mere fact of questioning this emancipation, this autonomy, is the number one blasphemy, the unforgivable sin in the eyes of modern man whose faith begins with this. Science can do everything. Science must be permitted to do everything it likes. Science is infallible and impeccable. All that is done by science is right no matter how monstrous, no matter how criminal an act may be, if it is justified by science, it is unassailable. The consequence of this is that technology and science are now responsible to no power and submit to no control other than their own. Needless to say, the demands of ethics no longer have any meaning if they come in conflict with these autonomous powers. Technology has its own ethic of expediency and efficiency. What can be done efficiently must be done in the most efficient way, even if what is done happens, for example, to be genocide or the devastation of a country by total war. Even the long-term economic interests of society or the basic needs of man himself are not considered when they get in the way of technology. We waste our natural resources, as well as those of undeveloped countries, iron, oil, etc., in order to fill our cities and roads with the congestion of traffic that is in fact largely useless and is a symptom of the meaninglessness, the meaningless and futile agitation of our own minds. Here's where it gets pretty good. It's going off now. The attachment of the modern American to his automobile and the symbolic role played by his car with its aggressive and rubric design, its useless power, its odious gadgetry, its consumption of fuel, which is advertised as having almost supernatural power. This is where the study of American mythology should begin. Meditation on the automobile, what it is used for, what it stands for, the automobile as weapon, as self-advertisement, as brothel, as a means of suicide, etc., might lead us at once right into the heart of all contemporary American problems, race, war, and crisis of marriage, the flight from reality into myth and fanaticism, the growing brutality and irrationality of American mores. I thoroughly agree with Bonhoeffer when he says, the demand for absolute liberty brings men to the depths of slavery. The master of the machine becomes its slave. The machine becomes the enemy of men. The creature turns against its creator in a strange reenactment of the fall. The emancipation of the masses leads to the reign of terror, of the guillotine. Nationalism leads inevitably to war. The liberation of man as an absolute ideal leads only to man's self-destruction quoted from ethics. Back to Merton. If technology really represented the rule of reason, there would be much less to regret about our present situation. Actually, technology represents the rule of quantity, not the rule of reason. It is by means of technology that man, the person, the subject of the qualified and perfectible freedom becomes quantified, that is, becomes part of a mass, mass man, whose only function is to enter anonymously into the process of production and consumption. He becomes on one side an implement, a hand, or better, a biophysical link between machines. On the other side, he is a mouth, a digestive system and an anus, something through which, past the products of his technological world, leaving a transient and meaningless sense of enjoyment. The effect of a totally emancipated technology is the regression of man to a climate of moral infancy. In total dependence, not on mother nature, such a dependence would be partly tolerable in human, but on the pseudo-nature of technology, which has replaced nature by a closed system of mechanisms, with no purpose but that of keeping themselves going. If technology remained in the service of what is higher than itself, reason, man, God, it might indeed fulfill some of the functions that are now mythically attributed to it. But becoming autonomous, existing only for itself, it imposes upon man its only rational demands and threatens to destroy him. Let us hope it is not too late for man to regain control, Thomas Merton, for all of you, or for none of you, whatever the case may be.