This is the most articulate testimony to the ongoing struggle to the human spirit from the insidious forces of dehumanization I have ever encountered. The point being that we should strive to have our systems work for us and not against us: eg: a food industry that doesn't poison us, a military that doesn't kill us in the name of security, energy production that doesn't pollute us, media that doesn't propagate fear, a medical system...
The bottomline to all endeavor should be the "quality" of human spirit experienced.
Lewis Mumford,“Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”
www.primitivism.com/mumford.htmThe center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.