We live in a society that tries to keep us dazzled with euphoria in a bright cloud of lively and joy-loving slogans. Yet nothing is more empty and more dead, nothing is more insultingly insincere and destructive than the vapid grins on the billboards and the moron beatitudes in the magazines which assure us that we are all in bliss right now. I know of course that we are fools, but I do not think any of us are fools enough to believe that we are now in heaven, even though the Russians are breaking their necks in order to become as rich as we are. I think the constant realization that we are exhausting pure vital spiritual energy in a waste of shame, the inescapable disgust at the idolatrous vulgarity of our commercial milieu (or the various other apocalyptic whoredoms that abound elsewhere on the face of the earth) is one of the main sources of our universal desperation.
Thomas Merton, OCSO
Faith and Violence, p. 116
