Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, … - Lewis Mumford

If the new world exploration did not come to anything like its happy expected fulfillment even in North America, where the odds were more favorable, it was because the new colonizers and settlers brought so much of the Old World in their refined equipment and their brutal customs with them. The wonder is rather that the hopeful dream has remained alive for so long, for some of its original luminosity still dazzles and blinds the eyes of many of our contemporaries who continue to pursue the same archaic fantasies, planning further voyages through outer space. Contemporary 'space age' prophets, who proclaim space exploration as the endless frontier and astronauts as the coming pioneers, throw an unrealistic glamour over both the past, and even more, the future of such efforts.

Such freedom as is granted by this society is the freedom given to conscript soldiers on leave; and no provision whatever is made for conscientious objectors, or for those who would work against the system. The American farmer who lately rebelled against legislation preventing him from growing more than his allotted quota of grain even to feed his own hogs found when he migrated to distant Australia in search of freedom that he had made only one mistake: even in that seemingly open and independent continent he was subject to a similar set of imbecile regulations.

Our chief reason for over-rating the importance of tools and machines is that man's most significant early inventions, in ritual, social organization, morals, and language, left no material remains, while stone tools can be associated with recognizable hominid bones for at least half a million years.