by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them - Will Durant

"Facts" replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.