Karl Marx never studied or understood causality. He paid no attention to the railway or steamboat.

We can win China and India for the West only by giving them the new media. Russia will not give these to them. Television prevents communism because it is post-Marx just as the book is pre-Marx.

The importance of a Machiavelli, a Hobbes, or a Marx is not primarily intellectual but catharctic. They don’t offer conceptual systems so much as emotional strategies.

The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed. So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.

From Adam Smith and Ricardo to Karl Marx and Keynes, economists have ignored all service/disservice environments. This blank in their vision has rendered their analyses sterile and irrelevant. Yet by supplying the needed insights to complete this blank, Innis became unintelligible. That is to say, he was stating actualities which most scholars preferred to know nothing about.

The eighteenth century had idealized the noble savage and Marx’s rear-view vision saw communism as tribal.

Marx and Engels saw conflicts of old figures as creating grounds for each other while they remained oblivious of the new information surround that had transformed their assumptions. They were attempting to match the concepts of an earlier age to the experience newly visible in the "rear-view-mirror" of the 19th century. They were unaware that percepts of existence always lie behind concepts of Nature.

One positive benefit that has been the result of the Marxist mental squint is the growing regard which is given to ways in which moral and economic assumptions react upon educational standards and on the reading habits of a community.

Detective literature may, indeed, be a prophylactic for suppressed rage. It may have saved us from Fascism or Communism by providing an armchair emotional cathartic for potential mob leaders. It may have brought all the prophecies of Marx to the bureaucratic parody we see today.

Even Aristotle was led into the “usury” trap by his failure to see the enormous service environments created by writing and coinage as wealth-makers. From Adam Smith and Ricardo to Karl Marx and Keynes, economists have ignored all service/disservice environments. This blank in their vision has rendered their analyses sterile and irrelevant. Yet by supplying the needed insights to complete this blank, Innis became unintelligible. That is to say, he was stating actualities, which most scholars preferred to know nothing about.