“Make a joke?” she echoed incredulously. “No, of course not!”
“In that case, it’s not just Madison that the automaknow more about than I do, but Mogshack too! My God! This is terrible!”
Staring at him in bewilderment, Ariadne said, “Jim, you-what’s wrong? You look haggard all of a sudden. You look old!”
“I’m not surprised,” he answered grimly. “Here, let’s see if I can recover the recording.” He glanced at his watch. “Now the time must have been-hmmm. Oh, roughly between fourteen-thirty and fifteen.” Turning to the desketary, he ordered it to review the recordings it had made during the relevant period.
“Find me the passage concerned with Dr. Mogreasons for approving of Matthew Flamen,” he concluded. There was a pause. Obediently the machine replayed the dialogue with the time-labeling tick in the background.
Reedeth: “How does Mogshack feel about this idea-Flamen recording the show for possible transmission?”
Automatics: “Any publicity which may help to dispel common misapprehensions about conditions in this hoswhere so many citizens of New York State are likely to spend part of their-”
Reedeth: “Look, I don’t want a PR handout! You wouldn’t expect Mogshack to welcome publicity on a spoolpigeon show like Flamen’s. People mainly associhim with exposes and scandals. So why should Moggive permission for this recording?”
Automatics: “Dr. Mogshack approves of anything which may further his personal ambition.”
Reedeth: “And what’s that?”
Automatics: “To find at least the population of New York State, and preferably the entire United States, committed to his care.”
A click cut short the recorded sound of Reedeth chuckling, but this time it didn’t seem in the least funny.
“Even with the advantage of a certain degree of hisperspective, such as we might expect to enjoy from our standpoint a few decades later, it is by no means easy to define the reasons why late twentieth-century society underwent so violent a process of fragfollowing a relatively long period of conand homogenization. Two factors render the analysis especially difficult: first, the human mind is not particularly well adapted to reconciling informafrom disparate sources (e.g. personal experience with the content of a school history-lesson, data from a printed page with those from a vuset), and the alleged simplistic linearity of the Gutenberg era-if it ever ex-came to an end before it had affected more than a minuscule proportion of the species; and second, the process is not merely still going on-it’s still accelerating.
“However, one can tentatively point to three major causes which, like tectonic events in the deep strata of the Earth’s crust, not only produce reverberations over enormous areas but actually create discontinuities sharp enough to be uniquely attributed: what one might call psychological landslides.
“By far the most striking of these three is the unforerejection of rationality which has overtaken us. Perone might argue that it was foreshadowed in such phenomena as the adoption by that technically brilliant sub-culture, the Nazis, of Rassenwissenschaft, Hoerbigpre-scientific Welteislehre, and similar incongruous dogmas. However, it was not until about two generalater that the principle emerged in a fully rounded form, and it became clear that the dearest ambition of a very large number of our species was to abdicate the power of reason altogether: ideally, to enjoy the same kind of life as a laboratory rat with electrodes implanted in the pleasure centers of his brain, gladly starving within reach of food and water.
“Roughly sixty percent of the patients currently in mental hospitals throughout North America are there because they did their best to achieve this ambition with the help of psychedelic drugs.
“But this is not the only level on which the effects of the process are detectable. It is notorious that one of the boom industries of the twenty-first century is the charm-and-idol business, spearheaded by the multi-bildollar corporation of Conjuh Man Inc. with its tight grip on all the Negro enclaves and most of the ex-colonial countries, and rapidly expanding into supposmore sophisticated areas in the wake of such firms as Lares Penates Inc.
“For once it is perfectly clear why they’ve had this swift and resounding success. Our society is no longer run by individuals, but by holders of offices; it’s comis such that the average person’s predicament compares with that of a savage tribesman, his horizons bounded by a single valley, for whom knowledge of the cycle of the seasons is a hard-won intellectual prize and whose only possible reaction when confronted with drought, or flood, or blighted crops, is to hypothesize evil spirits which he must placate by sacrifice and self-denial. There are no economic counterparts of weather forecasts available to the public. The data which might enable them to be issued over the vu-beams are jealously guarded by the priests serving corporation gods, and outsiders are compelled to put up with the physical consequences of mysterious incomprehensible seasons. Take a vacation; you come back to discover that an urban landmark has vanished as completely as though an earthquake had felled a mountain.