"And then rush home to get away from work and begin the real business of life, to enjoy ourselves. You know, for the vast majority of American families the – what seems to be the real point of life, what you rush home to get to is to watch an electronic reproduction of life. You can’t touch it, it doesn’t smell, and it has no taste.
You might think that people getting home to the real point of life in a robust material culture would go home to a colossal banquet or an orgy of love-making or a riot of music and dancing; But nothing of the kind.
It turns out to be this purely passive contemplation of a twittering screen. You see mile after mile of darkened houses with that little electronic screen flickering in the room. Everybody isolated, watching this thing. And thus in... no real communion with each other at all. And this isolation of people into a private world of their own is really the creation of a mindless crowd.
And so we don’t get with each other except for public expressions or getting rid of our hostility like football or prize-fighting. And even in the spectacles one sees on this television it’s perfectly proper to exhibit people slugging and slaying each other but oh dear no, not people loving each other, except in a rather restrained way.
One can only draw the conclusion that the assumption underlying this is that expressions of physical love are far more dangerous than expressions of physical hatred. And it seems to me that a culture that has that sort of assumption is basically crazy and devoted – unintentionally indeed but nevertheless in fact - devoted not to survival but to the actual destruction of life."
Alan Watts
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