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4:31

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

Reductionism is based on tautological circular reasoning rather than on scientific insight. But its attraction is enormous, and all the way through to the 20th century, totalism’s many faithful believers actually persevere in trying to weigh the soul in order to thus establish that it constitutes a physiological surplus which in some essential sense it would be possible to distinguish from the body, for example by throwing dying people onto industrial scales, whereby a few grams of exhaled air disappearing from the lungs at the moment of death are immediately interpreted as scientific evidence of the soul’s existence. Reductionism also makes it possible for the totalists to atomise existence, divide it up and sort the world into isolated units, which one naturally does one’s best to try to domesticate and control with the aid of constantly ongoing and increasingly far-reaching moralising. Totalism has a formidable weapon at hand in this endeavour, namely the most important by-product of written language, the law.