King of the castle Book

'Of all the changes that have taken place in the human condition over the past hundred years none is more significant than the increasing difficulty we now have in tracing acts to their owners. In earlier times and in more simple societies each act was branded with its owner's name. In the complex societies of today it might take the combined efforts of a detective and a moral philosopher to trace any given act to any one person. The State, the society or the organisation acts. 'They' act. But 'they' cannot be loved or blamed or touched. The need to attribute acts to men or women like ourselves finds no satisfaction.
'It has become essential to redefine the idea of human responsibility in relation to a society of jobholders and civil servants, a world in which the majority of men are absorbed into vast collectivities and appear to have as little personal stake in their own actions as the slaves or bondmen of other times. This has become all the more necessary because, so far as it is possible to make any predictions about the future, there are good reasons for believing that our world is moving towards ever more complex degrees of organisation and that the man who is neither a jobholder nor, directly or indirectly, a servant of the State will soon be regarded as a complete eccentric if not as an outcast. For socialist societies this is the acknowledged aim. Under capitalism it is the unintended but nonetheless unavoidable outcome, witness the fact that in that home of 'free enterprise', the United States, ninety per cent of the employed now work in organisations of one kind or another, whereas at the beginning of this century ninety percent were self employed.
'The survival of the kind of world we have made for ourselves 'in the context of advancing technology and of the growth of populations'depends upon a high degree of organisation and increasing collectivism, whatever the ideological flag under which it may sail. This world will try to survive for as long as it can, whatever the cost that has to be paid in loss of freedom and destruction of values.'

Such a brilliant book. My copy groans under the weight of the many markings it was subjected to. If the failings of the modern mind, and the sad bewilderment it finds itself in is your kind of read, this book shall click for you.