occurring, a change as great as ever occurred in the past. The
new techniques replace the use of the physical energy of animals
and men by that of steam, oil and electricity; they create means
of communication which transform the earth into the size of
one continent, and the human race into one society where the
fate of one group is the fate of all; they create marvels of devices
which permit the best of art, literature and music to be brought
to every member of society; they create productive forces which
will permit everybody to have a dignified material existence, and
reduces work to such dimensions that it will fill only a fraction
of man's day.
Yet today, when man seems to have reached the beginning of
a new, richer, happier human era, his existence and that of the
generations to follow is more threatened than ever. How is this
possible?
Man had won his freedom from clerical and secular author-
ities, he stood alone with his reason and his conscience as his
only judges, but he was afraid of the newly won freedom; he had
achieved "freedom from"—without yet having achieved "free-
dom to"—to be himself, to be productive, to be fully awake.
Thus he tried to escape from freedom. His very achievement, the
mastery over nature, opened up the avenues for his escape.
In building the new industrial machine, man became so
absorbed in the new task that it became the paramount goal of
his life. His energies, which once were devoted to the search for
God and salvation, were now directed toward the domination of
nature and ever-increasing material comfort. He ceased to use
production as a means for a better life, but hypostatized it
instead to an end in itself, an end to which life was subordinated.
In the process of an ever-increasing division of labor, ever-
increasing mechanization of work, and an ever-increasing size of
social agglomerations, man himself became a part of the
machine, rather than its master. He experienced himself as a
commodity, as an investment; his aim became to be a success,