The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

It was the painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s view that ‘the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind’.35 This was not an idle reflection. He returned to it with a vengeance in 1985: In 1953 I realized that the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind. But the straight line has become an absolute tyranny. The straight line is something cowardly drawn with a rule, without thought or feeling; it is a line which does not exist in nature. And that line is the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization … The straight line is atheistic and immoral. The straight line is the only sterile line, the only line which does not suit man as the image of God. The straight line is the forbidden fruit. The straight line is the curse of our civilization. Any design undertaken with the straight line will be stillborn. Today we are witnessing the triumph of rationalist know-how and yet, at the same time, we find ourselves confronted with emptiness. An aesthetic void, desert of uniformity, criminal sterility, loss of creative power. Even creativity is prefabricated. We have become impotent. We are no longer able to create. That is our real illiteracy.