Tickled Ferocious

If you tickle the sole of the foot of a sane man he temporarily loses his reason. When excited, confused, worked up, drugged, and shrieked at by the magnate and his press for a few weeks, 'mankind' becomes ferocious, that is all.

--Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

The End of Education, pt. II

Education plays, and will continue to play, a much more important part in government than physical and exterior force. Force is a passing and precarious thing, whereas to get inside a person' mind and change his very personality is the effective way of reducing him and making him yours. Merely to chain him up like a dog or a slave is meaningless. To kill him is equally meaningless. It is by taking him when he is very young, and educating him, that you can secure him to yourself.

--Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

The Art of Being Ruled

Could this be published today? Wyndham Lewis' introduction to The Art of Being Ruled:


Most books have their patients, rather than their readers, no doubt. But some degree of health is postulated in the reader of this book. Its pages are not intended to supply the figurative equivalent of Kruschen Salts or an enema. Nor is it the intention of its author to open a clinic or a nursing-home, or an institute for the half-witted, nor yet a beauty-parlor. Understanding on that point with the reader at the start will be an advantage.


A book of this description is not written for an audience already there, prepared to receive it, and whose minds it will fit like a glove. There must be a good deal of stretching of the receptacle, it is to be expected. It must of necessity make its own audience; for it aims at no audience already there with which I am acquainted. I do not invent (or if that was not an invention, then I am not happy enough to know) a class of esprits libres, or 'good Europeans,' as Nietzsche did. I know none.

Wyndham Lewis,  The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

Technological Pollination

It is because our lives are so attached to and involved with the evolution of our machines that we have grown to see and feel everything in revolutionary terms, just as once the natural mood was conservative. We instinctively repose on the future rather than the past, though this may not yet be generally realized. Instead of the static circle of the rotation of the crops, or the infinitely slow process of handiwork, we are in the midst of the frenzied war of machines. This affects our view of everything; our life, its objects and uses, love, health, friendship, politics; even art to a certain extent, but with less conviction.

Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964