Perhaps never before have the peoples of the world been so close to losing the very core of their humanity; for of what use are cosmic energies, if t… - Lewis Mumford

This immense 'negative creativity' constantly nullified the real gains of the machine. The booty brought back from a successful military expedition was, economically speaking, a 'total expropriation.' But it proved to be a poor substitute, as the Romans were later to discover, for a permanent income tax derived annually from a thriving economic organization. As with the later pillage of gold from Peru and Mexico by the Spaniards, this 'easy money' must often have undermined the victor's economy. When such imperial robber-economies became prevalent and preyed on each other, they cancelled out the possibility of one-sided gain. The economic result was as irrational as the military means.

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.

Kings have always boasted that their slightest wishes were commands. The classic proof of their power and their success was their command of limitless amounts of food and drink, limitless quantities of clothes and jewels: the services of innumerable slaves, servants, and officials: limitless sensual stimulations, and not least, limitless opportunities for sexual intercourse, for even here erotic delight was measured in gross quantitative terms. The affluence that once was monopolized by the king and his court is now being held up as the ultimate gift of the power system to mankind at large.