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12:21

(In »Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity«)

The academic establishment’s monopoly on critical thinking – which is already regrettable in itself, since it effectively shuts out life-giving impulses from outside – has placed thinking in a vicious circle of interpretations of interpretations: a collective, somnambulist movement towards a vegetative passivity without any critical questioning whatsoever or any social activism directed towards the statist-corporatist complex that controls late capitalist society as a whole. This relationship is illustrated by the fact that research is conducted on old philosophy rather than any new critical thinking being created. The question we must ask ourselves is why, under late capitalism, the academic world should be better at thinking critically – critical of precisely the system that, by definition, it is an integral and moreover fundamental part of – than other old and in the same sense corrupt institutions in history. This would be like us expecting the Catholic Church during the 18th century to create the Enlightenment and kill God. One does not tend to bite the hand that feeds one, at least not deliberately and consistently.