But then - [the 1950's] - it was not as easy to see as it is today that when you make a powerful technology available to human beings with normal form of egocentric consciousness, planetary disaster is inevitable.  Moreover, the point had to be made that the egocentric predicament was not a moral fault to be corrected by willpower, but a conceptual hallucination requiring some basic alterations of common sense; a task comparable to persuading people that the earth is round rather than flat.

• ego
• humanity
• technology
• consciousness