- Feb 5, 2002
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The totalitarian mind is like “a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine … whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.”
Kurt Vonnegut used this image in his novel “Mother Night” to describe totalitarian madmen, but we all have the kind of mind he described. It’s a good image for the mind of fallen humanity and one that suggests an explanation for a particular problem: why we can hold with conviction beliefs that make little and often no sense, sometimes to the point of insanity, while thinking sanely about everything else.
It’s the problem that makes us say to others, or others say to us, “What’s wrong with you? You know better than that.” But they (or we) don’t.
Continued below.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
Kurt Vonnegut used this image in his novel “Mother Night” to describe totalitarian madmen, but we all have the kind of mind he described. It’s a good image for the mind of fallen humanity and one that suggests an explanation for a particular problem: why we can hold with conviction beliefs that make little and often no sense, sometimes to the point of insanity, while thinking sanely about everything else.
It’s the problem that makes us say to others, or others say to us, “What’s wrong with you? You know better than that.” But they (or we) don’t.
The logic can’t be faulted
Continued below.
How our minds are like a cuckoo clock in hell
Kurt Vonnegut’s image of broken minds show how missing mental "teeth" make inhumanity seem reasonable — even to the faithful.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
