Loeb enlisted magic and voodoo—sifted, of course, through scientific reason. Since, Loeb argued, men and women had always found the meaning of life in “moments of ecstatic tension” generated by spiritual practices, then scientific study of these experiences could allow citizens of a Technocracy to “attain them at will” through psychological or pharmaceutical techniques.9 Rapture now followed, not prayer or contemplation, but advances in industrial chemistry. A Technocratic culture would ensure an unprecedented efficiency of beatitude; the will to believe would yield to the scientifically
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