Symbols

Amongst the clutter, an old clipping on Y2K and the "genres of anxiety" - SF, horror, and crime - and this remark, from critic John Clute: "Symbols, of course, are not 'real'. But they shape the minds that create them. The Millennium is an active, potent symbol generated by a species that has gained the power to make its symbols work for it." Think about this - it's the bridge between subjective ideas, like the looming apocalypse, and objective ideas, like nuclear weapons. Or, to paraphrase Robots of Death, if you told me the world would end tomorrow, and I knew you had the power to end it, I'd listen to you.

ETA: And similarly, from a letter to New Scientist (11/12/10): "Magical thinking also assumes that number, of itself, has power to order the way the universe behaves. This may have offended 19th-century mathematicians, but the appearance of such theoretical constructs as the Fibonacci sequence and fractal structures in nature suggests otherwise."