What's Wrong with the World

G. K. Chesterton was among the few in the West who could see the brewing ideological storms that would soon make landfall, not just in the form of world wars and totalitarianism, but also in the pervasive modern dehumanization that consumes us to this day, in 1910, when both the industrialists and the intelligentsia both promised only "progress."

Chesterton saw the beginnings of "awake capital" and how it coincides with and encourages social progressive more than a century ago. He explains that there is an unwritten partnership between big business and progressives. The one (big business) impoverishes the worker by eviscerating the material conditions of family life, while the other (the progressive) tells him he doesn't need family in the first place. Big business “wants women workers because they are cheaper,” while the progressive “calls the women’s work ‘freedom to live her own life.’ ”