“By our overvaluation of physical power and scientific truth, aloof from other human needs, we have paid the same price Faust had to pay when he made his compact with Mephistopheles: we have lost our souls, or to speak in more psychological terms, we have depersonalized ourselves and have turned our conscious thinking selves into automatons. Is it any wonder that our whole civilization goes on repeating processes it has once started, even when they have lost both of their original meaning and any valuable human end? Behold the way in which we continue to produce butter and wheat we neither eat nor share, goods that we do not have the social providence to distribute, knowledge we do not have the intellectual capacity to assimilate, instruments of mass extermination whose use might put an end to the human race.”
Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, 347