B1028 <=> B1030 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 1029]

“’There is everything in him except himself.’

“And indeed, my boy, owing to the complete absence of good patriarchal customs and to their notorious ‘education,’ the contemporary beings of that continent have already become completely transformed into what are called ‘automatons’ or living mechanical puppets.

“At the present time any one of them can become animated and manifest himself outwardly, only when there are accidentally pressed the corresponding what are called ‘buttons’ of those impressions already present in him, which he mechanically perceived during the whole of his preparatory age.

“But unless these buttons are pressed, the beings there are in themselves only, as again our highly esteemed Mullah Nassr Eddin says, ‘pieces of pressed meat.’

“It must without fail be remarked here that one of the principal causes of this state of the beings of contemporary civilization is also that same onanism of theirs, a disease which in recent times has come to be almost epidemic there, and which is in its turn also a consequence again of their education of children, thanks to a certain maleficent idea established among its rulers and which is already, as it were, an inseparable part of the consciousness of everybody, namely, their maleficent idea that ‘to speak to children about the sex question is absolutely improper.’

“And further, I again emphasize that just this, for their naive reason, trifling idea, the significance of which none of them takes into consideration – considering it simply as what they call a question of ‘decency’ or ‘indecency’ – is the chief cause of their having come to this phenomenal so to say ‘psychic mechanicality.’

“In the totality of definite understandings which they call ‘education,’ there is even a certain section which elucidates and exactly indicates just what is, as they express it, ‘decent’ and what is ‘indecent’ to say to children.