“The environment is always the brainwasher, so that the well-adjusted person, by definition, has been brainwashed”

“The newspapers have to have bad news, otherwise there would be only ads, or good news. Without bad news we could not discern the ground rules of the environment. This does not necessarily mean the environment is bad, but it means its operation upon us is total and ruthless. The environment is always the brainwasher, so that the well-adjusted person, by definition, has been brainwashed. He is adjusted.” - Marshall McLuhan, Vision 65 (October 1965)

“quickly reach a stage in which we had no unconscious. This would be like dreaming awake. Such may well be the prophetic meaning of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: his idea, among many others, that tribal man lived a dream and modern man is “back again Finnegan” into the cycle of the tribal involvement, but this time awake. This possibility that we are actively engaged in liquidating the unconscious for the first time in history, behooves us to pay some attention to how it is structured, and to what function it serves in human affairs. It may prove to be indispensable to sanity.” - Marshall McLuhan, Address at Vision 65 (October 1965)