In Megalopolis the sentiment of friendship wastes away. Friends become, in the vulgarism of modern speech, “pals,” who may be defined as persons whom your work compels you to associate with or, on a still more debased level, persons who will allow you to use them to your advantage. The meeting of minds, the sympathy between personalities which all cultured communities have regarded as part of the good life, demand too much sentiment for a world of machines and false egalitarianism, and one detects even a faint suspicion that friendship, because it rests upon selection, is undemocratic.
~ p. 31
Ideas Have Consequences
Neh 