...This is the arena in which a spiritualized disobedience means most. It doesn't mean a second New Deal, another massive bureaucratic attack on our problems. It doesn't mean taking to the streets, throwing bricks through the window at the Bank of America, or driving a tractor through the local McDonald's. It means living differently. It means taking responsibility for the character of the human world. That's a real confrontation with the problem of value. In short, refusal of the present is a return to what Thoreau and Ruskin called "human fundamentals, valuable things," and it is a movement into the future. This movement into the future is also a powerful expression of that most human spiritual emotion, Hope.p.124

Like characters in Greek tragedy, we seem fated to push technology towards its ultimate degree as if we were possessed by malignant gods. We call these gods "curiosity" and "creativity" and "reason" and "progress", but when these words are perverted by technocrats, they are more like the four horsemen of the apocalypse.