The steady pressure to consume, absorb, participate, receive, by eye, ear, mouth, and mail involves a cruelty to intestines, blood pressure, and psyche unparalleled in history.
We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.
I can't stay in L.A. too long or it starts to grow on me in a bad way.
When I'm tired, I see industrial pictures. But I'll see one every two months. If I see one every day, I'll become an idiot.
Sometimes I go to movies, and it's just a bombardment, and I'm not entertained by them - I'm assaulted by them! And I know I sound like such a drama queen, but I find that really strange.
The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise. Even to admire otherwise than on the whole and where "I admire" is but a synonyme for "I remember, I liked it very much when I was reading it ," is too much an effort, would be too disquieting an emotion!
In the 500-channel universe, which may, of course, contain many more channels than 500, the fun never stops - fun at such a fever pitch as to sometimes seem threatening, numbing, even agonizing.
Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.
As the pleasure principle is unconstrained by a moral compass based on a respect for others, it is increasingly shaped by the need for intense excitement and a never-ending flood of heightened sensations.
In this day and age, there's just so much that can hyperstimulate us, and curiously, it is not satisfying us.
Sometimes it appears that we're reaching a period when our senses and our minds will no longer respond to moderate stimulation. We seem to be approaching an Age of the Gross. Persuasion through speeches and books is too often discarded for disruptive demonstrations aimed at bludgeoning the unconvinced into action.
People are used to being stimulated. People are drunk on entertainment and when you're going out and seeing movies where 200 people are machine gunned down and vampires are tearing people's throats out, and I'm not saying that is bad or it should be censored, but people are drunk on stimuli.
