What Marshall McLuhan told the Bilderberg group when invited to address them in 1969
Marshall McLuhan, Director
May 14, 1969
His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard,
Soestdijk Palace,
The Hague,
Holland.
Your Royal Highness:
It was good to be there. It is good to be back.
As you know, I was a rather bad boy at Bilderberg. Frankly, I was staggered at the very low level of awareness of the contemporary world exhibited by all the guests present. As my friend Wyndham Lewis, the painter, put it: "The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present." Ordinary people live thirty years back in a state of motivated somnambulism. Such was the state of the delegates at Bilderberg. Association with poets and painters of many lands have accustomed me to dealing with people of trained perceptions and contemporary awareness. Without a knowledge of all the poets and painters and artists from Baudelaire to Joyce, it is futile to attempt any appraisal of the formal or efficient causes initiated by the evolutionary extensions of our bodies which we call technology.
The paper readers as well as the bankers and statesmen and educators present at Bilderberg had undergone no perceptual training. They were men of a few simple old-fashioned concepts. As a colonial, I had nourished the illusion that Europeans, at least, were aware of the contemporary arts as necessary guides to change. My disillusion was total. The delegates at Bilderberg were embalmers (embombers) of a dead past. They live in a rear-view mirror, blowing both horns of their dilemmas!
The great advantage in participating in Bilderberg is that it did give me a means of testing the level of awareness which the incompetence of the participants has enabled them to attain. Every man has a right to protect his own ignorance. However, these men are responsible for coping with a changing world which has set them scurrying for cover in the opposite direction of the changes that we have released. I asked them to instance a single example in human history...