Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible,
mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In “nature,” the struggle for food, clothing and
shelter consumes all of a man’s energy and spirit; it is a losing struggle—the
winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000
bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who
lived without technology.) To work only for bare necessities is a luxury that
mankind cannot afford.