Tyranny of the obsessional character

This essay relates many of the unwelcome features of modern life to the increasing influence of obsessional personality traits. This influence is becoming more pronounced as civilization advances and comes to be increasingly reliant upon depersonalized mechanical and commercial systems. The result has been a glut of unwanted information, an exaggerated reliance upon computing and numbers, an overgrowth of bureaucracy, a discarding of intuitive wisdom in favor of calculative reasoning, a loss of simplicity, a jargonized language, and ultimately, the degradation of human relationships and of human beings themselves.