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Never again would I worry about where I ought to live, once I saw the massive barns and granaries crumble and fall, and the wide solitary fields of my childhood covered in industrial and human filth.
Instead of industrial society it is fashionable to say consumer society, in order to avoid the problem by pretending to confront it.
Living with continuous musical sound, as in a humid atmosphere, a thick vapor of sounds, is conducive to a certain stupor, a heavy dulling of the spirit, which primes gentle souls for outrageous demands.
Prior to the industrial age, it was possible to trust in the future without being totally stupid.
But who can believe today’s prophecies, since we are yesterday’s splendid future?
The scars of industry on long-suffering soil insult the beauty of the land, and this foolish recklessness reveals hollow victory. Modern, industrial man looks upon his endeavors and is puffed up with pride. In his blind audacity, he believes he has secured a promise of infinite ascension merely because a light has briefly shone upon him. Confident in his rights, he disdains the traditional instruments of his triumph. Ashamed his spirit would ever be so humbled, he severs the true and silent source of his sap.
Only the handmade object has a soul.
In order to compel the technician to devote all attention to his work, industrial society, without disfiguring his skull, compresses his brain.
Civilization is in agony when agriculture becomes an industry and is no longer regarded as a way of life.
Even in arts and letters, the artisan is displaced by the industrialist.
The industrial and egalitarian society is the dream of the intellectual and the nightmare of the artist.
Today’s novel does not smell like lamp oil but machine oil.
It would be easier to resolve modern problems if, for example, the utopian argument were true, that what causes the multiplication of plastic objects is only the greed of the commercial manufacturer, and not the idiotic admiration of the consumer.
The social mistakes of Christianity, in the 19th and 20th centuries, sprang from the error of adapting its innate conservatism to the defense of social issues defined by revolutionary projects adverse to its doctrine. Christianity suffers the consequences of having defended the industrialization process of a democratic society.
Bourgeois hegemony culminates with the industrialization of communist society. The bourgeoisie is not so much a social class as the ethos of industrial society itself.
Modern man destroys more when he builds than when he destroys.
The aesthetic degradation of a society increases in proportion to the amount of horsepower installed.
Industrialization offers only two choices: capitalism or communism. Thus excluding the old decent options.
Mankind will one day festively commemorate the events that initiated the dismantling of industrial society.
Optimism for modernity is a commercial product designed to oil the gears of industry.
Industrial society is the fruit of those souls in which the virtues destined to serve have usurped the position of the virtues destined to command.
Bodies live comfortably in modern, high-tech apartments, but souls live nowhere but the ruins of an old building.
Modern pantheism is the ideology of the industrial revolution.
“Totalitarian society” is the common name for the species whose scientific name is “industrial society.” The embryo allows us to foresee the savagery to come.
The craftsman is a creature; the industrial worker is a body.
One is an entire person; the other a diminished, anonymous figure.
If not for the possibility of transcendence, the industrialization of the earth would be a ridiculous culmination of human history.
In order to cure the patient injured in the 19th century, industrial society had to dull and debase him in the 20th century. Spiritual misery is the price of industrial prosperity.
Industrial prosperity enables all to share in the vulgarity of the rich and the servitude of the poor.
Dismal, like an urban development project.
The great industrial trade fairs are the showcase of everything civilization does not need.
To industrialize a country, it is not enough to expropriate the rich man; it is necessary to exploit the poor man.
The stupidity of an individual is approximately proportional to the enthusiasm with which he responds to some new piece of technology.
Industrial society makes vulgarity available to everyone.
Other ages may have been as vulgar as our own, but none had the inexorable amplifier, the tremendous abat-voix, of modern industry.
Each basic problem solved by industrial society results in the creation of several serious problems.
A prolonged childhood— permitted by industrial society’s current prosperity— results merely in a growing number of infantilized adults.
Modern architecture knows how to build industrial warehouses, but not a palace or temple.
This age will bequeath nothing but the tracks of the machines used to service our most sordid greed.
Civilization was an episode that was born with the Neolithic Revolution and died with the Industrial Revolution.
Humanity today has replaced the myth of a bygone golden age with the myth of a future plastic age.
The “embourgeoisement of the proletariat” occurs when it comes to believe in the industrial gospel preached by socialism.
The ruling class of an agrarian society is an aristocracy, that of an industrial society, an oligarchy. The standard-bearers of freedom celebrated in the 19th century turned out to be the vanguard of industrial despotism.
After seeing work exploit and demolish the world, laziness seems the mother of the virtues.
To suppose that a communist technocracy would not satisfy the vast majority is to pay man undeserved homage.
Industrial society is condemned to forced perpetual progress.
The left and right wings merely argue over who is to have possession of industrial society.
The reactionary longs for its death.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: From an atlas to accompany a monograph on the geology of the Aspen district in Colorado, 1898
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