Even In A Society As Tightly Controlled

In All Advanced Industrial Societies, Education Has Become The Single Most Important Vehicle Of Upward Mobility.

Institutions Provide Procedures Through Which Human Conduct Is Patterned, Compelled To Go, In Grooves Deemed Desirable By Society. And This Trick Is Performed By Making These Grooves Appear To The Individual As The Only Possible Ones.

He Who Sups With The Devil Had Better Have A Long Spoon. The Devilry Of Modernity Has Its Own Magic: The [believer] Who Sups With It Will Find His Spoon Getting Shorter And Shorter--until That Last Supper In Which He Is Left Alone At The Table, With No Spoon At All And With An Empty Plate. The Devil, One May Guess, Will By Then Have Gone Away To More Interesting Company.

In A Market Economy, However, The Individual Has Some Possibility Of Escaping From The Power Of The State

The Human Organism Is Thus Still Developing Biologically While Already Standing In A Relationship To Its Environmont. In Other Words, The Process Of Becoming Man Takes Place In An Interrelationship With An Environment. (...) From The Moment Of Birth, Man's Organismic Development, And Indeed A Large Part Of His Biological Being As Such, Are Subjected To Continuing Socially Determined Interference.