This isn't sustrainable transport (not by a long shot), but it did touch on a few societal issues that are relevant here.
Some of the quotes I've selected here sound extreme out-of-context. Saul's argument is overall quite well reasoned and sound though, and I recommend this book to anyone interested in participatory democracy or politics.
For the moment let's concentrate on dialects. Not the old-fashioned regional dialects, but the specialized, inward-looking verbal mechanisms (I'm avoiding the word language because they are not language; they do not communicate) of the tens of thousands of monopolies of fractured knowledge. These are what I would call the dialects of the individual corporations. The social science dialects, the medical dialects, the science dialects, the linguist dialects, the artist dialects. Thousand and thousands of them, purposely impenetrable to the non-export, with thick defensive walls that protect each corporation's sense of importance.
The arts cannot blame business for this phenomenon. Any more than business can blame the arts. Nor can either of them blame or be blamed by public servants or scientists. The reliance on specialist dialtects, indeed the requirement to use specialist dialects, has become a universal condition of our contemporary elites.
But the core of this disease is perhaps to be found in the social sciences. These often well-intentioned, potentially useful false sciences feed the dialects of the public and private sectors. The humanities themselves are increasingly infected by both the social science method and its approach to language.
Over-compensation is one explanation for this. Economists, political scientists and sociologists in particular have attempted to imitate scientific analysis through the accumulation of circumstantial evidence, but, above all, through their parodies of the worst of the scientific dialects. As in business and governmental corporations, the purpose of such obscure language could be reduced to the following formula: obscurity suggests complexity which suggests importance. The dialects are thus more or less conscious weapons of self-protection and unconscious tools of self-deception.
[pp. 49-50]
But think about our society. How are real decisions made today? Through negotiations between the specialized and interest groups. These are the fundamental political units. Citizens who rise, citizens who win responsibility, who succeed, enter these units. What about the distinction between public and private? The concept of arm's length is evaporating. Government services are slipping into private hands. And the government is adopting private industry standards and methods. As for the individual, the one-third to one-half of the population who are part of the managerial elite are indeed castrated as citizens because their professions, their employment contracts and the general atmosphere of corporate loyalty make it impossible for them to participate in the public place.
Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience:
[p. 91]
Steel producers have no incentive to cut down on pollution, insofar as they do not pay the laundry or health bills to which it gives rise. As a result the market mechanism does not accurately serve one of the purposes that it purports to fulfill—namely, presenting society with an accurate assessment of the relative costs of producing things. [1, page 87]
[p. 139]