(From The Way of the (Modern) World by Craig M. Gay, 295-96; 299-300)

Of course, one of the deepest splits that has opened up within our modern civilization has been between our need for genuinely personal relatedness and the dreary impersonality of so much of modern institutional life, a split that has been helpfully characterized as a kind of "overgrowth of objective culture" at the expense of truly human subjectivity. This overgrowth of objectivity is evident in the "managed" quality of modern political life; in modern science's "objectification" of the world and in the utilitarian spirit of modern technology; and in the modern economy's "leveling" of all quality by means of merely quantitative monetary abstraction. Indeed, the overgrowth of objective culture is even evident in the so-called private sphere of subjective autonomy, for it appears that self-constructing individuals quite often envision and treat even themselves largely as manipulable objects....It is, of course, not terribly surprising to find that the overgrowth of objectivity in modern society and culture has yielded the fruit of loneliness. Unable to truly apprehend others, the self that is possessed by the spirit of objectification is itself reduced to an object incapable of truly personal existence. The cost of establishing control over the world by means of technical-rational objectification, in other words, has been nothing short of personal existence, and we have established a measure of control over our world only to discover that the self-understanding responsible for initiating the process-- which seemed at first to be so confident in its position in the universe --has by now vanished into "postmodern" nothingness. This is perhaps the supreme irony of the modern intellectual condition. The immensely painful and nature of this condition, furthermore, which might otherwise be such as to call the whole project of objectification into question, is assuaged by the distractions and diversions of consumer culture...