The alleviation of personal need is emotionally so categorical an end-in-itself, that to deprive it of this ultimate purpose and to convert it into a mere technique for the transsubjective ends of a social unit constitutes a significant triumph for the latter. This distantiation between the individual and the social unit—despite its lack of visibility—is more fundamental and radical in its abstractness and coldness than sacrifices of the individual for the collectivity in which the means and the ends tend to be bound together by a chain of sentiments.

XREF: Connects to Weber's iron cage and the disenchantment of modernity, and to Marx's alienation of labor. The abstract coldness of technique over sentiment echoes these classic diagnoses of modern social formation.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 413