Hoffer, Eric. The Temper of our Time. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967.

The technology developed during the Late Neolithic Age lasted almost unchanged down to the industrial revolution. A greater gulf lies between us and Washington than lay between him and the Egyptian farmers who labored for Cheops. It would be legitimate, therefore, to assume that there is in man’s nature a built-in resistance to change. It is not only that we are afraid of the new, but that deep within us there is the conviction that we cannot really change, that we cannot adapt ourselves to the new and remain our old selves, that only by getting out of our skin and assuming a new identity can we become part of the new. In other words, drastic change creates an estrangement from the self, and generates a need for a new birth and a new identity. And it perhaps depends on the way this need is satisfied whether the process of change runs smoothly or is attended with convulsions and explosions. (9)

The curious thing is that with the spread of automation we may seen something like the present Latin American pattern emerging in the advanced industrialized countries. The banishing of workers by automation from factories, warehouses, docks, etc. will fill the cities with millions of unemployed workers waiting for something to happen. Condemned to inaction, and deprived of a sense of usefulness and worth, they will become receptive to extremism, and to political and racial intolerance. (16)

Now, at one point in history, God and the priests seemed to become superfluous, yet the world went on as before. Then again the aristocrats became superfluous and hardly anyone noticed their exit. In Russia, where they have capitalism without capitalists, businessmen are superfluous, yet things get done somehow. But when the masses become superfluous it means that humanity is superfluous, and this is something that staggers the mind. (20)

There is nothing more explosive than a skilled population condemned to inaction. Such a population is likely to become a hotbed of extremism and intolerance, and be receptive to any proselytizing ideology, however absurd and vicious, which promises vast action. (21)