Hubert: Have you tried to walk though the West End of London recently? The pavements just cannot accommodate all the people. It just seems to me that an epochal change has taken place in the West.
Aldous: Oh really.
Hubert: Yes, and I feel there is a new self consciousness to accommodate it.
Aldous: Oh really. How’s that?
Hubert: Oh you know after the great wave of decolonisation’s and national liberations in the 60s and 70s..well us, people in the West, have had to face...I have to say... without much warning and unexpectedly a range of individual and collective subjects who were ...you know, not there before. I think it is having an incalculable effect on everyone.
Aldous: What do you mean, more people, less room, more spatial discomfort....that kind of thing?
Hubert: Yes and just the sheer dizziness crowds induce in one.
Aldous: Are you saying it is biological?
Hubert: Biological?
Aldous; Oh you know how rats living in crowded conditions show distinct changes in emotional reactivity and their stress rates soars ...that sort of thing.
Hubert: Yes, yes, that is part of it, but it’s more...oh, it’s just that the more crowds, the more precarious...well...that status of our own hitherto, unique, how can I put it...consciousness of self.
Aldous: Yes, I see, well that would be a precious thing to lose.
Hubert: What will happen to us?
Aldous: What do you mean?
Hubert: Well, human being are just such extraordinary crystalline structures, I know I am...we have been excreted out of...I don't know...milennia of narcissim and self-love?
Aldous: You are getting far too intense about all this. It is not like there is some fast approaching collapse in society. Anyway, what is your deepest fear about this 'crowding' as
you put it.
Hubert: The terror of anonymity
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