Quotes About Megamachine

Now, the whole picture of 'backwardness' changes as soon as we cease to judge earlier technologies by the provincial standards of our own power-centered culture, with its worship of the machine, its respect for the uniform, the mass-produced, the mass-consumed, and with its disregard for individuality, variety and choice, except in strict conformity to the demands of the megamachine.

Significantly, it was during the third dynasty of Ur-a period of viogorous constructive activity-that all the kings except the founder claimed divinity. This evidence decisively couples divine kingship with the characteristic public works program of the megamachine. Little tasks might still be left to little men, but big tasks belonged to the king by reason of the special powers he commanded: above all, the unique power to create a colossal labor machine.

Ideally the megamachine's personnel should consist of celibates, detached from family responsibilities, communal institutions, and ordinary human affections: such day-to-day celibacy as we actually find in armies, monasteries, and prisons. For the other name for the division of labor, when it reaches the point of solitary confinement at a single task for a whole lifetime, is the dismemberment of man.

Had Napoleon succeeded in his conquest of Europe, and had he had time to consolidate his military-bureaucratic regime, the megamachine might have emerged, at least halfway toward its modern form, by the middle of the nineteenth century: indeed, even the bedraggled ideological aftermath of Napoleonism conjured up in the mind of young Ernest Renan a future not unlike that which we are now facing: dictatorship by a scientific elite.

Patently, a chronic state of war was a heavy price to pay for the boasted benefits of 'civilization.' Permanent improvement could come only by exorcising the myth of divine kingship, demounting its too-powerful megamachine and abating its ruthless exploitation of man-power.

But now the forces challenging the power complex have a special advantage that derives from the advances in technology: its members, however separated in space, are united in time, are united in space through books, discs, taped records, and frequent, quickly arranged face-to-face meetings. Hence resistance to the megamachine is no longer pathetically sporadic, but increasingly coordinated through constant inter-viewing as well as inter-communication.

The production of the atom bomb was in fact crucial to the building of the new megamachine, little though anyone at the time had that larger objective in mind. For it was the success of this project that gave the scientists a central place in the new power complex and resulted eventually in the invention of many other instruments that have rounded out and universalized the system of control first established to meet only the exigencies of war.

In short, the Germans not merely enlarged the dimensions of the ancient megamachine, but made important innovations in the techniques of mass control: innovations that later corporate megamachines are now perfecting with the aid of spying devices, opinion polls, market research, and computerized dossiers on private life. In the background, the torture chamber and the crematorium, if not planetary incineration, are still ready to complete the job.

Only through encouraging decentralized communal agents will such a worldwide organization as an effectively reconstituted United Nations find the massive human backing needed for banishing all weapons of genocide and biocide, and ensuring justice and comity among its members. To assemble peace-making power in a world authority without such a revitalizing of autonomous smaller units capable of exercising local and regional initiatives, would be to rivet together the ultimate megamachine.

But perhaps the greatest threat to the efficiency of the megamachine came from within: from its rigidity and repression of individual ability, and from a sheer lack of rational purpose.