What was happily proved by this early revolution is something that we perhaps need to be reminded of again today: that neither exact science nor engi… - Lewis Mumford

Apart from murder and rape, the most horrendous crimes punished by civilized authority stem back to the 'unpardonable sin'of kingship: disobedience to the sovereign. Murderous coercion was the royal formula for establishing authority, securing obedience, and collecting booty, tribute, and taxes. At bottom, every royal reign was a reign of terror. With the extension of kingship, this underlying terror formed an integral part of the new technology and the new economy of abundance. In short, the hidden face of that beautiful dream was a nightmare, which civilization has so far not been able to throw off.

Failing to divide its social chromosomes and split up into new cells, each bearing some portion of the original inheritance, the city continues to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Here the city has absorbed villages and little towns, reducing them to place names, like Manhattanville and Harlem in New York; there it has, more happily, left the organs of local government and the vestiges of an independent life, even assisted their revival, as in Chelsea and Kensington in London; but it has nevertheless enveloped those areas in its physical organization and built up the open land that once served to ensure their identity and integrity.

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.