"That is still the way of life in what we call the developing countries, where they still make their own bread, thresh their own wheat, pluck their own chickens, and gossip endlessly in the square. What we have developed is only society, the collectivity, the organisation, regimentation, planning, bureaucracy, economy, mechanics, and anonymous impersonal technology. As for man's need to be treated not as a machine for production but as a person, to assert his personal identity, and to have genuine relationships with other people, in short to live in conviviality, we are incontestably under-developed - not even developing, but regressing.
" Everything is sacrificed to profit and to material prosperity. If only it could ensure a living wage for the whole of humanity! But the West with all its scientists and all its machines has not achieved that. It would have the whole of the Third World on its side if it could do so. On the contrary, it turns out that our wealth depends on low-priced raw materials, on the poverty of others. If at the very least our material prosperity fostered culture! But culture has slipped away from the silence of the library, where there was a chance to sit down and think, into the racket of the media. Even our pleasures have become mass movements, radio-controlled by advertising and exploited by commercial enterprises.
"Caught in this universal conditioning, man too often capitulates and allows himself to be trapped in a net of routines. He loses his natural creativity."
- Dr. Paul Tournier, Creative Suffering
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