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Uncanny, foreboding words from 60 yrs agoโon tech, culture, where we are and where weโre headed. A needed perspective in our bubble of builders/inventors on the vapidity of the times weโre in and what we choose to create.
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โMammoth productive facilities with computer minds, cities that engulf the landscape and pierce the clouds, planes that almost outrace time - these are awesome, but they cannot be spiritually inspiring. Nothing in our glittering technology can raise man to new heights, because material growth has been made an end in itself, and, in the absence of purpose, man himself becomes smaller as the works of man become bigger.
Gargantuan industry and government, woven into an intricate computerized mechanism, leave the person outside. The sense of participation is lost. When an individual no longer feels a sense of responsibility to his society, the content of democracy is emptied. When culture is degraded, inexorably the individual is impelled to pull away from a soul-less society. This process produces alienation - perhaps the most pervasive and insidious development in contemporary society.
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Our problem today is that we have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. Summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: โImproved means to an unimproved endโ. This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril, if there is not proportionate growth of the soul.โ
- MLK, 1967, 1964
English
