We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the fa… - Lewis Mumford

"Let me put the contrast in a single concrete example. The physician who finds time to give personal attention to his patients and listens to them. carefully probing inner conditions that may be more significant than any laboratory reports, has become a rarity. Where the power complex is dominant, a visit to a physician is paced, not to fit the patient's needs, but mainly to perform the succession of physical tests upon which the diagnosis will be based. Yet if there were a sufficient number of competent physicians on hand whose inner resources were as available as their laboratory aids, a more subtle diagnosis might be possible, and the patient's subjective response might in many cases effectively supplement the treatment. Thoreau expressed this to perfection when he observed in his 'Journal' that "the really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure."

Without this slowing of the tempo of all activities the positive advantages of plenitude could not be sufficiently enjoyed; for the congestion of time is as threatening to the good life as the congestion of space or people, and produces stresses and tensions that equally undermine human relations. The inner stability that such a slowdown brings about is essential to the highest uses of the mind, through opening up that second life which one lives in reflection and contemplation and self-scrutiny. The means to escape from the "noisy crowing up of things and whatsoever wars on the divine" was one of the vital offerings of the classic religions: hence their emphasis was not on technological productivity but on personal poise. The old slogan of New York subway guards in handling a crush of passengers applies with even greater force to the tempo of megatechnic society: "What's your hurry...Watch your step!

"The new prophets were men of a modest humane disposition: they brought life back to the village scale and the normal human dimensions; and out of this weakness they made a new kind of strength, not recognized in the palace or the marketplace. These meek, withdrawn, low-keyed, outwardly humble men appeared alone, or with a handful of equally humble followers, unarmed, unprotected. They did not look for institutional support: on the contrary, they dared to condemn and defy those in established positions, even predicting their downfall if they continued their established practices: "Mene, mene, tekel upharsin." "Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting."

Even more intransigently than kings, the Axial prophets dared depart from customary usages and traditions, not only those of civilization, but the sexual cults, with their orgies and sacrifices that derived from neolithic practices. For them, nothing was sacred that did not lead to a higher life; and by higher they meant emancipated from both materialistic display and animal urgencies. Against the personified corporate power of kingship they stood for the precise opposite: the power of personality in each living soul."

But what would become of mass production and its system of financial expansion if technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and human satisfaction were the guiding aims. The very conditions for current financial success — constantly expanding production and replacement — works against these ends. To ensure the rapid absorption of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility, or forced obsolescence through frequent arbitrary changes of fashion. Without constant enticement and inveiglement by advertising, production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year.