The true satirist of our time, who played such a hugely successful joke on us that his works are still taught in our schools as economic treatises–a procedure as sensible as using Gulliver for a textbook in geography–said with his usual penetration that inventions like the airplane, far from easing the burden of living, work to increase it because, while such devices do greatly help the process of concluding business, they also multiply the occasions for starting it, and since man’s tendency to create confusion has, since the beginning of time, slightly outrun his capacity to cope with it, these toys of a new age simply project the old losing race on a gigantic scale, with man yielding ground by the increased drain on his nervous system.
p 195
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