81
" This system of coercion, ruthless enough under Lenin and Trotsky, became absolute under Joseph Stalin, whose paranoid fears, suspicions, and murderous malevolence were in part signs that the new megamachine still lacked an essential feature that the old one possessed: an awe-inducing religion and a ritual of divine worship that would gain by mass suggestion a more complete submission and more abject obedience than terror alone can achieve. As with Hitler later, Stalin's methodical madness resulted in the deliberate slaughter on a wholesale scale not only of peasants, but of the informed groups and classes, the trained technicians and creative minds, upon whom such a complex fabric as a megamachine, even in its primitive state, depends for its existence. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
92
" In its extreme Stalinist form the Russian megamachine betrayed, even before Hitler, the most sinister defects of the ancient megamachine: its reliance upon physical coercion and terrorism, its systematic enslavement of the entire working population, including members of the dictatorial party, its suppression of free personal intercourse, free travel, free access to the existing store of knowledge, free association, and finally its imposition of human sacrifice to appease the wrath and sustain the life of its terrible, blood-drinking God, Stalin himself. The result of this system was to transform the entire country into a prison, part concentration camp, part extermination laboratory, from which the only hope of escape was by death. The 'liberty, fraternity, and equality' of the French Revolution had turned, by a further revolution around the same axle, into alienation, inequality, and enslavement. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
94
" When the moment comes to replace power with plenitude, compulsive external rituals with internal, self-imposed discipline, depersonalization with individuation, automation with autonomy, we shall find that the necessary change of attitude and purpose has been going on beneath the surface during the last century, and the long buried seeds of a richer human culture are now ready to strike root and grow, as soon as the ice breaks up and the sun reaches them. IF that growth is to prosper, it will draw freely on the compost from many previous cultures. When the power complex itself becomes sufficiently etherialized, its formative universal ideas will become usable again, passing on its intellectual vigor and its discipline, once applied mainly to the management of things, to the management and enrichment of man's whole subjective existence. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
97
" Unfortunately long enurement to the Czarist megamachine had trained the Russians in forms of docile conformity that could hardly be distinguished from willing cooperation. Here and there a minority discovered little niches and hideouts where, silently, some portion of untrammelled life could be maintained. But woe to prouder souls, who dared open defiance. The writer Isaak Babel, who demanded the privilege of writing 'badly'-that is, not in conformity with the party line-and who proclaimed that silence, too, might be an effective mode of expression, was soon put out of the way and executed. Even silence could be provocative. Because this revolution, like its bloody predecessor, devoured its children in a methodical saturnalia of violence, it was long before the megamachine could produce in sufficient numbers the new elite, whose views and whose way of life conformed to its requirements: the technicians, the bureaucrats, the scientists. Fortunately the indispensable scientists, aided by orthodox science's methodical divorce from moral and social issues, continued to provide the system with the quotas of new knowledge necessary to accelerate the operations of the megamachine and effect the transition, via nuclear energy, from the archaic to the modern form. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
98
" Behind the picture of fresh human possibilities I have been drawing all through 'The Myth of the Machine' is a profound truth to which almost a century ago William James gave expression. "When from our present advanced standpoint," he observed, "we look back upon past stages of human thought, we are amazed that a universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication should ever have seemed to anyone so little and plain a thing....There is nothing in the spirit and principles of science that need hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal forces are the starting point of new effects. The only form of thing we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the abstract elements of that. And this systematic denial on science's part of the personality as a a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
99
" By the time Stalin died he had rehabilitated and magnified all the most repulsive features of the ancient megamachine, while his scientific and technical collaborators, both voluntarily and under compulsion, had already begun to construct the principal components of the modernized megamachine. Because of its head start, the archaic form even now still dominates the Soviet system, though powerfully re-enforced by the new agents. The fact that Stalin, like Lenin before him, was treated at death to the ancient Egyptian process of mummification, and was put on view for public worship, makes the parallel almost too neat to seem anything but contrived-as if invented by me to support one of the major themes of this book. But so it actually was. "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
100
" Richter compares the conditions of rat domestication with those now provided by the 'Welfare State'-ample food, no danger, no stress, uniform environment and climate, and so forth. But he notes that, under these seemingly favorable conditions, organic deterioration has taken place: a decrease in the size of the adrenal glands, which help the organism meet stress or fatigue and forfend certain diseases: while the thyroid gland, the regulator of metabolism, becomes less active. Not strangely, perhaps, the brains of the domestic rat, and perhaps their mental ability, are smaller. At the same time, the sex glands mature earlier, become bigger, show more activity, and result in a higher rate of fertility. How human! "
― Lewis Mumford , The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2)
