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Another from the Massey Lecture series. Steiner‘s premise is that western civilization continues to look for certainties - in Marxism, in Freud, in astrology and the anthropology of Levi-Strauss - to fill the gap left behind by the decline of the Christian religion. He further posits that the search for ultimate scientific truth (for ex. that one day the earth will cease to exist) is something we cannot grasp which is why we turn elsewhere. Con‘t

“The cults of unreason, the organized hysterias, the obscurantism which have become so important a feature of Western sensibility and behaviour during these last decades, are comical and often trivial to a degree; but they represent a failure of maturity, a self-demeaning, which are, in essence, tragic.”

As relevant today as it was in 1974.