•The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may
eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing
through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing
human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social
machine.
•
•If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system
grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had
best break down sooner rather than later.
•
•The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. Many people
understand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude
toward it because they think it is inevitable. But we don't think it is inevitable.
•

•Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives
them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction. It is already happening to some
extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern
society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an
individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he
would otherwise find intolerable.
•
•Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for
the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes
pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual
to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.
•
The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an
individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of
stress.
•

•In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs. It
is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work
on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate
amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple obedience.
•
•Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. A technological
advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later
on. When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not
as he chooses, it does not necessarily remain optional. In many cases the new technology changes
society in such a way that people eventually find themselves forced to use it.