Many of his friends and followers—the “gadget-worshippers” who staffed the research laboratories of corporate industry—were also “priests of power” who, contemptuous of fleshly limitations and evasive of personal responsibility, sought perfect subordinates who never disagreed, showed fatigue, or organized unions. These shamans and priests of modernity pursued their quest for absolute power with automated machinery, “the modern counterpart of the Golem.” “Those who suffer from a power complex,” he had written in 1950, “find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions.”
