As the creators of sophisticated technologies, we have made ourselves increasingly machine-like; robotic servants of institutional systems we have be… - Butler D. Shaffer

The efforts of one organism to live at the expense of another is, when confined to members of the same species, a form of cannibalism.

As the historian Robert Himmelberg has pointed out, many businessmen were not only desirous of modifying the antitrust laws in order to permit trade agreements among competitors but of continuing the WIB in order to protect industries from postwar price adjustments. In connection with such an objective, Bernard Baruch recommended to [Woodrow Wilson |President Wilson]] that the board be continued in existence, an action that Baruch felt Wilson could take as part of his general war powers. Wilson declined.

The pyramid expresses the essence of a world premised on vertical power, in which interpersonal relationships are yoked together in systems of domination and subservience. No more poignant image of a top-down world—one in which institutional violence operates as a kind of ersatz gravitational force—exists than this. Members of the institutional hierarchy—who long ago learned that they could more readily benefit by coercing their fellow humans than by trading with them—have seen to it that others be inculcated in a belief in the necessity of pyramidalism. Our entire institutionalized world—from the more violent political organizations to more temperate ideologies—is premised on the shared assumption that only in vertically-structured institutionalized authority can mankind find conditions of peace, liberty, and order.