Word: promethean
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...country's ancient cultural heritage has been all but obliterated; but no longer do beggars, prostitutes and addicts throng the cities or bandit gangs roam the countryside. Most fundamentally, perhaps, the deeply rooted Confucian attitudes of docility and resignation have virtually disappeared in favor of Mao's Promethean notion that the human will can solve all problems...
Died. Charles Augustus Lindbergh, 72, Promethean American aviator (see THE NATION...
...declines and falls. Here is a man of practical intelligence and good will, a man equipped by temperament and upbringing to hope. Yet his book is an epitaph on liberalism written with conspicuous pain by an author who includes himself in the epitaph. Heilbroner fits his own description of Promethean man, full of "driving energy," "nervous will": a problem solver. Now, he grimly concludes, that gift of fire may burn up the world. For the sake of the race Prometheus must go. To be replaced by whom? Atlas, Heilbroner proposes, the burden bearer rather than the problem solver...
Looked at in the long run, the anti-Confucian diatribe is part of Mao's continuing effort to transform the nature of man. He wants to replace the Confucian habits of tranquillity, obedience and fatalism with a new Promethean man of struggle and combativeness. For him, Confucius continues to be a symbol of everything in China that represents hierarchy, stagnation and complacency. For that reason, the sage cannot be permitted to sleep in peace...
...biologists, physicists and chemists, recognizing that what goes on inside the brain cannot be divorced from what goes on outside, in increasing numbers are poking, prodding and analyzing the organ in an attempt to unlock its secrets. Man has split the atom, cracked the genetic code and, in a Promethean step unimaginable less than a quarter-century ago, leaped from his own terrestrial home to the moon. But he has yet to solve the mysteries of memory, learning and consciousness or managed to understand himself...