Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light... The world, at that moment , opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me,… - Lewis Mumford

Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates the Western World is founded... on the principle of conspicuous waste.

As respects its isolation and its indifference to the basic requirements of all organic activity, the pecuniary power complex discloses a startling resemblance to a newly discovered center in the brain-that which is called the pleasure center. So far as is known, this pleasure center performs no useful function in the organism, unless it should prove that in some still obscure way it plays a part in more functional pleasure reactions. But in laboratory monkeys this localized center can be penetrated by electrodes which permit a micro-current to stimulate the nervous tissue in such a fashion that the flow of current-and hence the intensity of pleasure-can be regulated by the animal himself.

Apparently the stimulation of this pleasure center is so rewarding that the animal will continue to press the current regulator for an indefinite length of time, regardless of every other impulse or physiological need, even that for food, and even to the point of starvation. The intensity of this abstract stimulus produces something like a total neurotic insensibility to life needs. The power complex seems to operate on the same principle. The magical electronic stimulus is money.

What increases the resemblance between this pecuniary motivation and that of the cerebral pleasure center is that both centers, unlike virtually all organic reactions, recognize no quantitative limits. What has always been true of money, among those susceptible to its influence, applies equally to the other components of the power complex: the abstraction replaces the concrete reality, and therefore those who seek to increase it never know when they have had enough. Each of these drives, for power, for goods, for fame, for pleasure, may-it goes without saying-have as useful a part to play in the normal economy of a community as in the human body itself. It is by their detachment, their isolation, their quantitative over-concentration, and their mutual re-enforcement that they become perverse and life-c

"From the fourth century on, the stelae and monuments of the great kings abound in insensate boasts of power and vain threats against those who might ransack their tombs or deface their inscriptions-events that nevertheless repeatedly took place. Like Marduk in the Akkadian version of the Creation Epic, the new Bronze Age kings mounted their chariots "irresistible and terrifying," "versed in ravage, in destruction skilled...wrapped in an armor of terror." With such sick-making sentiments we are still all too familiar: they are mimicked in the nuclear press releases of the Pentagon.

Such constant assertions of power were doubtless efforts to make conquest easy by terrifying the enemy beforehand. But they also testify to an increase of irrationality, almost proportional to the instruments of destruction that were available: something we have seen again in our own time. This paranoia was so methodical that the conqueror, on more than one occasion, would level a city to the ground, only to build it again immediately on the same site, thus demonstrating his ambivalent role as destroyer-creator, or devil-god, in one."