Given modern machinery, there can be no industrial prosperity without mass production. Mass production is impossible without mass consumption. Other things being equal, consumption varies inversely with the intensity of mental life. A man who is exclusively interested in things of the mind will be quite happy (in Pascal's phrase) sitting quietly in a room. A man who has no interest in things of the mind will be bored to death if he has to sit quietly in a room. Lacking thoughts with which to distract himself, he must acquire things to take their place; incapable of mental travel , he must move about in the body. In a word, he is the ideal consumer, the mass consumer of objects and of transport.

-Aldous Huxley, 'Foreheads Villainous Low'. Music At Night, 1931