Joseph’s Reviews > The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise > Status Update

Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech...

In our consumer society, man incessantly struts like a peacock but takes no care of his soul. He displays a façade and splendid clothes that wear out and are good for the moths.

Without noise, postmodern man falls into a dull, insistent uneasiness. He is accustomed to permanent background noise, which sickens yet reassures him. Without noise, man is feverish, lost. Noise gives him security, like a drug on which he has become dependent.