In the theatre, at a ball, at a ball game, in church, every 
individual enjoys all those others present. The pleasure of being 
among the masses is the sense of the joy in the multiplication 
of numbers, which has long been suspect among the literate 
members of Western society.

     In such society, the separation of the individual from the 
group in space (privacy), and in thought (“point of view”), and 
in work (specialism), has had the cultural and technological 
support of literacy, and its attendant galaxy of fragmented 
industrial and political institutions. But the power of the printed 
word to create the homogenized social man grew steadily until 
our time, creating the paradox of the “mass mind” and the 
mass militarism of citizen armies. Pushed to the mechanized 
extreme, letters have often seemed to produce effects opposite 
to civilization, just as numbering in earlier times seemed to