The more competent and streamlined journalism becomes, the greater its threat to public mind -- particularly in a countly like the United States. It becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the secondhand from the real thing, until most people end by forgetting there is such a distinction. The very success of technique engenders a whole style of life for the period, which subsists purely on externals. What lies behind those externals -- the human person, in its uniqueness and its totality -- dwindles to a shadow and a ghost.
Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)