Recently I got the idea to learn something new, and thought the Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz would be just the ticket.  What an exquisite author.  The bulk of his ideas are beyond my ken but I found the following passages of interest, which jumbled up somehow into the cartoon that follows.

“The modern worker lacks individuality… Capitalism deprives him of his human nature by reducing him to an element in the work process.  And like any object in the business world, he can be bought and sold.  Because of his social condition he quickly loses any concrete and human relationship to the world…

A government of technicians, the ideal of contemporary society – would thus be a government of instruments.  Functions would be substituted for ends, and means for creators. 

Society would progress with great efficiency but without aim, and the repetition of the same gesture, a distinction of the machine, would bring about an unknown form of immobility, that of a mechanism advancing from nowhere to nowhere.”  – Octavio Paz, 1985