they are normal only in relation
to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that
abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.
The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.
City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract.
An organization is neither conscious nor alive. Its value is instrumental and derivative. It is
not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the
good of the individuals who are the parts of the collective whole.
The masterpieces of painting,
sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political
propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a government or a
priesthood.
Our epoch has been given many nicknames–the Age of Anxiety, the Atomic Age, the Space Age. It might, with equally good
reason, be called the Age of Television Addiction, the Age of Soap Opera, the Age of the Disk Jockey.
the rulers of tomorrow’s over-populated and over-organized world will try to impose social and cultural uniformity upon adults and their children.
Individuals must be suggestible enough to be willing and able to make their society work, but not so suggestible as to fall helplessly under the spell of professional mind-manipulators.
It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free–to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.
humanize the metropolis by creating within its network of
mechanical organization the urban equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and co-operate as complete persons, not as the mere embodiments of specialized functions.