My Own View, For What It's Worth,

There Is The Dumb Silence Of Slumber Or Apathy... The Fertile Silence Of Awareness, Pasturing The Soul... The Silence Of Peaceful Accord With Other Persons Or Communion With The Cosmos.

It Is By Losing Ourselves In Inquiry, Creation & Craft That We Become Something. Civilization Is A Continual Gift Of Spirit: Inventions, Discoveries, Insight, Art. We Are Citizens, As Socrates Would Have Said, & We Have It Available As Our Own.

Thwarted, Or Starved, In The Important Objects Proper To Young Capacities, The Boys And Young Men Naturally Find Or Invent Deviant Objects For Themselves. ... Their Choices And Inventions Are Rarely Charming, Usually Stupid, And Often Disastrous; We Cannot Expect Average Kids To Deviate With Genius. But On The Other Hand, The Young Men Who Conform To The Dominant Society Become For The Most Part Apathetic, Disappointed, Cynical And Wasted.

When A Village Ceases To Be A Community, It Becomes Oppressive In Its Narrow Conformity. So One Becomes An Individual And Migrates To The City. There, Finding Others Like-minded, One Re-establishes A Village Community. Nowadays Only New Yorkers Are Yokels.

The Stultifying Effect Of The Movies Is Not That The Children See Them But That Their Parents Do, As If Hollywood Provided A Plausible Adult Recreation To Grow Up Into.