What kind of a civilization do we have? It has become top-heavy, lopsided, unbalanced, and therefore dangerous to the healthy development of the human race. Its intellectual and technical advance is indeed tremendous, but faith, intuition, and the moral virtues do not find in this iron-hard framework enough freedom for their operation. Indeed, they are being stifled. Such a course if continued can only end in their complete suffocation. Man is in danger of becoming a merely mechanistic, merely physical, and merely selfish entity. This is not in accord with the higher meaning of his life, and since civilization does not give sufficient signs of its willingness or evidence of its ability to correct this unbalance, since the valuable services which it has rendered in the past are coming to an end, Nature is no longer giving it the protection which it might otherwise have had against the destructive forces within itself. Between the incessant turmoil, the incessant multiplication of wants, the incessant physical and intellectual activities, the incessant stimulation of emotional desire, and the constant appeal to egoism--between these things and the inner voice that calls men back to the deeper things of spiritual life there is a hidden conflict which really exists under the obvious one.
-- Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 4 : World Crisis > # 72
