If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. WILLIAM BLAKE - Aldous Huxley

[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students — how to write piercingly.