"From my middle teenage years, I recall living in a deep alienation from the modern condition, with a restless desire to be free of its brilliant

mediocrity. This was the modernity which, as Max Weber acknowledged, seemed to be trapped in a ‘shell as hard as steel’, where the iron of natural limitations had been replaced by steel bonds of our own making, a terrible alienation from which no mere political solution can release us. Pessimistically, Weber was sure that human happiness and fulfilment must be increasingly restricted in the machine-age, whose logic seeks to reconstitute the human subject as a consumer and producer, and nothing more.[4] The very principle of individuation which the West, since the Enlightenment, has taken to be the basis of personal fulfilment, has allowed us to view ‘the Other’ increasingly as an object good only for manipulation, and the results have been disastrous. Family, neighbourhood and community are as inappropriate to those caught in the steel shell as are contemplation, prayer, and art which exists for any sake other than itself. Herbert Marcuse, in the 1960s, spoke of One-Dimensional Man, trapped by the very rhetoric of choice and freedom in a technologically-enabled totalitarian reality, the power of whose chains stems from their ubiquity, technical competence, and invisibility."

-Shaykh Abdal-Hakim Murad, Quicunque Vult, or, A teenage journey to Islam