R. Briffault, The Making of Humanity, 1919 (excerpt)

"It is not the facts of the environment which are now man's weapons and tools, which have to be discovered and used, but men, men's minds. Not to harmonize and correspond with facts as they are is now the object of thought, but to harmonize and correspond with the order of ideas on which power and authority rest . . . The motive, the criterion of thought is changed in its foundation, its function is diverted and transformed. Its aim and purpose is not how to fulfil its original cognitive function, but to frustrate it. Thought suffers from a functional disease. It is no longer rational-thought, it is power-thought.... The disease is absolutely inevitable and incurable. No amount of good intentions can save the holder of any form of power from its fatal ravages. It is not a question of wickedness or unscrupulousness, it is a question of rigid psychological mechanics. The power-holder can no more divest himself of power-thought than the rich man can enter the kingdom of heaven. . . . An enormous amount of falsified power- thought, by far the largest proportion, is sincere, sub-conscious, well-intentioned self-deception, an hypertrophied personal equation. But we are too prone, I think, in our tolerant euphemistic way ... to minimize in that process the part of deliberate fraud. . . . Daily we may see everywhere about us laldaboth engaged in his Procrustean task; facts, arguments, valuations arc adjusted, lopped or stretched, suppressed or suggested on the iron bed of his interests. . . . The falsifying operation of power-thought, beginning perhaps as deliberate action, rapidly becomes spontaneous, automatic.

All of the nature of deliberate intellectual dishonesty, even if at first dimly present, very soon wholly cliappears; and without any consciousness of prejudice, with the fullest conviction and purpose of moral and intellectual rectitude, power thought operates with vulpine astutenes, in a medium of stainless integrity and candour. . . . The holders of power have been the civilizers of mankind, its teachers, its educators; its conceptions, language, ideas, are in an enormous measure their creation. From our mother's lips we have learned power-thought, and our youth has been thrilled with its echoes from the mouths of our herues.” (Robert Briffault, 1919)