There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.
Guy DebordRead
No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens... spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques how science has been reduced to justifying existing power structures instead of exploring and improving the world.
Guy Debord's quote highlights the detrimental shift in the role of science, suggesting that rather than being a tool for understanding and enhancing the world, it has been coerced into justifying actions and maintaining the status quo. This perspective implies that the true potential of scientific inquiry is stifled by dominant ideologies that utilize it as a means of control rather than enlightenment, leading to a regression in the pursuit of knowledge and truth.
Themes
ScienceKnowledgePowerJustificationCritique
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about the ethics of scientific research, you can quote Debord to emphasize the misuse of science in justifying unethical practices.
More from Guy Debord
All quotes →Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.
Guy DebordRead
Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.
Guy DebordRead
He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.
Guy DebordRead
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.
Guy DebordRead
The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.
Guy DebordRead
Similar quotes
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It turned out that the buckyball, the soccer ball, was something of a Rosetta stone of an infinite new class of molecules.
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The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.
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The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification-judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind-essentially sum up the aim and method of modern science. The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgments, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own.
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As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.
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Science is essentially an anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.
Paul FeyerabendRead