Benjamin & Eliot

Mankind which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympic Gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. Walter Benjamin

The more highly industrialised the country, the more easily a materialistic philosophy will flourish in it, and the more deadly that philosophy will be . . . And the tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women - of all classes - detached from tradition, alienated from relegion and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.
 T. S. Eliot