The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times - Rene Guenon (1945). An esoteric book that summarises everything as a direction which moves away from quality and towards quantity. Here is an excerpt that uses this system to analyse modern workplace anonymity: "[...] tendency to uniformity demands that individuals shall be treated as mere numerical 'units', thus realizing equality by a leveling down, for that is the only direction in which equality can be reached 'in the limit' [...] Anyone who wonders what happens to the individual in such conditions will find that [...] he is so to speak reduced to his substantial aspect, and this amounts to saying that he becomes scarcely more than [...] 'a body without a soul'. From such an individual the qualitative or essential aspect has indeed almost disappeared ('almost', because the limit can never actually be reached); and [...] the individual really no longer has any 'name' that belongs to him, because he is emptied of the qualities which that name should express; he is thus really 'anonymous', but in the inferior sense of the word. This is the anonymity of the 'masses' of which the individual is part and in which he loses himself,…
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times
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