This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less
real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great
masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying
means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive
observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in
order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they
behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling
ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist
the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer
the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their
trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties
of citizenship. Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand,
remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the
nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of
the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that
hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass
of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They
become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to
ancestral patterns of behavior.
- Lewis Mumford
