The growing rift between society's productive forces and the form of the social relations is accompanied by a growth of acute mental disorders among the wielders of personified powers, especially in the offices of the ideological establishment. Extremely articulate, highly educated and very cultured individuals engage increasingly in activities which, if performed by a working man, would lead to his commitment to a mental hospital for life, with universal approval. It is hard to find peasants or workers who spend years devising methods to derail trains, who develop plastics that will burn while sticking to the skin of a human being, who concoct poisons for a town's water supply, who design concentration camps for people they consider threats to their Country's security, who devote their lives to growing germs which can annihilate a year's harvest. State officials consider a working man deranged if he shoots his foreman. It is not among workers, but among Chemists and Physicists, Sociologists and Economists, that the concentration camps are designed, that the burning plastic jellies are in- vented, the germs and poisons developed, the calculated slaughters patiently devised. These people are not considered deranged; each is considered an expert in a field. They are not committed to insane asylums; they are lodged in each other's company in cities which are built by the estranged power of producers but are geographically removed from the centers of production. They are among the best lodged, best fed and best entertained members of modern society. Yet their behavior exhibits a complete dissociation between their apparently human powers of perception and the inhuman consequences of their actions. Like the one-year old child who blows up a house by turning on the oven gas without lighting the oven fire, these seeming adults continue to grin and play, remaining completely innocent of their own deeds. The childlike innocence, the helplessness in the face of productive instruments combined with a meticulous rationality and calculated scheming when the same individual operates the same instruments by remote control—in short, the mental derangement of these individuals, is a direct consequence of the dislocation of personified
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