Some parts of the past must be preserved, and some of the future prevented at all costs.

And as we stand on the edge of darkness
Let our chant fill the void
That others may know

In the land of the night
The ship of the sun
Is drawn by
The grateful dead.

-- Tibetan "Book of the Dead," ca. 4000 BC.

Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

With half the country in the market, the gap is no longer just between those with incomes going up and those with stagnant incomes. It's between those with a steadily escalating net worth multiplying in the market and those who have little prospect of building any net worth. It makes the separation between haves and have-nots seem more like a division between will-always-haves and won't-ever-haves.

Robert Eaton, co-chairman of my employer, DaimlerChrysler, took home $69 million in total compensation last year. It would take an employee earning $50,000 per year 1,380 years to make that amount. Assuming Mr. Eaton works 60 hours per week, he earns $50,000 in just two and a half hours. Sound absurd? It is.

Average wages are beginning to creep up, but beware when you hear the term "average," because the income gap is growing and the top is pulling up the average.

The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad foil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds -- where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough -- a modest living-and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.

We used to think of Great Britain, with its castles and peerages, as being the epitome of a class-based society. Today, we far surpass Britain in the disparity of income. That is economically disastrous and morally wrong.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

[A computer is] like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.