ABSTRACT
We may thus speak of the malaise as the "oppression of liberated man", the oppression of modernity. It has become fashionable to state that progress brings more unsolved problems, the spread of education brings more illiteracy, the machine chokes nature, and the "communication revolution" propagates waves of indifference in the population. From the Dostoevsky's Kiriloff-episode on, itself a sign of our feeling of self-oppression thus of a double malaise, modern man experienced modernity not as a liberation but as an oppression. To be more precise, he feels again oppressed, this time not by kings, lords, feudal- or slave holding social structures, but by the very structure he himself has carefully and scientifically elaborated! This is what hurts and confuses modern man, the whole modernity: We can no longer claim to be oppressed and imposed upon by external forces, we are now our own masters.
