ABSTRACT
The main consequence is that confidence in the powers of science and technology is underpinned, in the popular as sometimes in the professional mind, by a faith as fervent, as uninformed and as irrational as that which maintains the most bizarre magical or religious systems. The message of the religion of technology is that people should be passive consumers of the products of expertise and mechanical invention. The very fragility of the mechanistic structures people erect testifies to the desperation of our undertaking. The psychotherapies, or at least some of them, have of course not been quite as crass as this, and, given an interest in rationality and the evidence of one’s own experience, one may be thankful that most psychotherapeutic theories do see human distress as arising out of human commerce with the world and the other human beings in it.
