The Age of Noise

 Aldous Huxley

Molinos (and doubtless he was not the first to use this classification) distinguished three degrees of silence -- silence of the mouth, silence of the mind and silence of the will. To refrain from idle talk is hard; to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder; hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will.

The twentieth century is, among other things, the age of noise. Physical noise, mental noise and the noise of desire -- we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the television, is nothing but a conduit through which prefabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, then the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with babel of distractions -- news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis ...

In most countries the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of fantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego's central core of wish and desire....  Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving -- to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its Divine ground.

The Perennial Philosophy