Imagine...

It is 9PM. You are on a bus station, about to board a bus for a long-distance ride. You look at the bus, and notice that it has a pair of old-fashioned wax candles as headlights. You rub your eyes. Are you dreaming? Is this a weird joke of some kind? Or an art project? Well of course—this is an absurd story. An impossibility. So why are we talking about it? Because on a much larger scale—on the level of our society as a whole, where the things are so large that we cannot see them by naked eye—this is precisely what is going on. We are, metaphorically speaking, on a risky night ride in a bus with candle headlights, without having any way to see that this is going on.

Seeing things whole

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

☞ Neil Postman here serves as an icon of the attitude we have toward information. For more detail, see the corresponding article.