Thanatos: The Deliverer

"Knowledge tolerates no dissent. She grinds the rebellious soul with all its mysteries into dust."

The Personification of Science

Here's Neil Postman quoting Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents in the first chapter of Technopoly. Although I've expanded the quote a little here:

... We ought to be content to conclude that power over nature is not the only precondition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of cultural endeavor; we ought not to infer from it that technical progress is without value for the economics of our happiness. One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? And there is a long list that might be added to benefits of this kind which we owe to the much-despised era of scientific and technical advances. 

The real cost of every advance is that which we must leave behind...