Profit and power

"You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace ... And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life."

~ Joseph Campbell

"Now the two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment. At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny.

Even the term 'economy' has lost its original meaning, which had to do with household management and husbandry. Most economists now never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage 'to strengthen the economy.'

Corporate industrialism has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature."

~ Wendell Berry, 2012 Jefferson Lecture, Washington, D.C.