The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent p… - Carroll Quigley

...they have brainwashed us into believing in the last 150 years... that quantitative change is superior to qualitative attributes. If we can turn out more... it doesn't matter if they're half as good. ...We're quantifying everything, and that is why we're trying to put everything on computers. Governments will no longer have to make decisions; computers will do it.

In fact, violence as a symbol of our growing irrationality has had an increasing role in activity for its own sake, when no possible justification could be made that the activity was seeking to resolve a problem.

No slave system has ever been able to continue to function on the slaves provided by its own biological reproduction because the rate of human reproduction is too slow and the expense from infant mortality and years of unproductive upkeep of the young make this prohibitively expensive. This relationship is one of the basic causes of the American Civil War, and was even more significant in destroying ancient Rome.