Tempi moderni

"Man can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos. Because his characteristic function and highest asset is conception, his greatest fright is to meet what he cannot construe – ‘the uncanny’...
Therefore our most important assets are always the symbols of our general orientation in nature, on the earth, in society, and in what we are doing.
There are at least three points where chaos – a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability – threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, at the limits of his moral insight. Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all, if they become intense enough, radical challenges to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it."
(Cliffort Geertz, The interpretation of Culture)