Nature and Experience in the Culture of Delusion : How Industrial Society Lost Touch with Reality

While the historical development of symbolic power has benefitted humanity enormously, there is an insidious and seldom recognised price that goes beyond environmental degradation and cultural disintegration. With insights from both social and natural sciences, this book explores the changing character of subjectivity in contemporary life. Industrialism has alienated us from nature, disconnected us from our own embodiment, and blinded us the character of the technological society we have ourselves produced. This book brings together ideas and research from both social and natural sciences to throw light on the hidden dimensions of industrial life, showing how the emerging global economic system has dissolved our embodied subjectivity into industrial processes. The symbolic abilities that have allowed us to dominate all other creatures have now entrapped us within systems that we do not understand and have little control over, making us as vulnerable to the extension of economic and technological ideologies as our ancestors were to the natural threats that surrounded them. If we are to regain our humanity and integrity, the essential first step, outlined in this book, is to recognise and challenge the sources of our own powerlessness Front Matter....Pages i-ix Symbolism Breaks Free....Pages 1-36 The Natural and the Industrial....Pages 37-83 Growing Out of the World....Pages 84-99 Lost in (Symbolic) Space....Pages 100-142 How the Mind Took Over the World....Pages 143-220 The Industrialised Individual....Pages 221-282 Back Matter....Pages 283-327