B937 <=> B939 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 938]

“As the cause of the delay of my departure may well illustrate for you the evil resulting from a certain invention of these American beings which is very widely spread over the whole of your planet, and which is one of the chief causes of the continued, so to say ‘dwindling of the psyche’ of all the other three-brained beings of your unfortunate planet, I shall tell you about it a little more in detail.

“Just this maleficent invention of the beings of this continent, which I now intend to explain to you, has not only been the cause of the acceleration of the tempo of the still greater ‘dwindling’ of the psyche of all the three-brained beings breeding on that unfortunate planet of yours, but it was and still is the cause also that in the beings of all the other continents of recent times there is already completely destroyed that being-function which it is proper for all three-brained beings to have, and which was the one single function which even until the last century arose in their presence of its own accord, namely, that being-function which is everywhere called the ‘sane instinct to believe in reality.’

“In the place of this function, very necessary for every three-brained being, another special very definite function gradually crystallized, whose action induces in its bearer a continuous doubt about everything.

“This maleficent invention of theirs they call ‘advertising.’

“Better to understand what follows, I must first tell you that several years before this trip of mine to America, once when traveling on the continent of Europe, I bought myself some books to read in the train to pass away the prospective long and tedious railway journey. In one of these books, written by a very famous writer there, I read an article about this America in which a great deal was said about what is called ‘the slaughterhouses’ existing in that same city Chicago.