To have a life that is in any way detached from the megatechnic complex , to say nothing of being cockily independent of it, or recalcitrant to its d… - Lewis Mumford

What distinguishes language from isolated gestures and signs, no matter how numerous, is that it forms a complex ramifying structure, which in its conceptual entirety presents a Wiltbild or comprehensive symbolic framework capable of embracing many aspects of reality: not a static representation like a picture or a sculpture, but a moving picture of things, events, processes, ideas, purposes, in which every word is surrounded by a rich penumbra of original concrete experiences, and every sentence brings with it some degree of novelty, if only because time and place, intention and recipient, change its meaning. Contrary to Bergson, language is the least geometric, the least static; of all the arts.

Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and built-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.

This essential coalition between royal military power and often dubious supernatural authority anticipated a similar alliance between the scientists and mathematical games theorists with the higher agents of government today, and was subject to similar corruptions, miscalculations, and hallucinations.