From Aldous Huxley’s (1937) Ends and Means (Soon at IWP Books):

In the democratic countries, intelligence is still free to ask whatever questions it chooses. This freedom, it is almost certain, will not survive another war. Educationists should therefore do all they can, while there is yet time, to build up in the minds of their charges a habit of resistance to suggestion. If such resistance is not built up, the men and women of the next generation will be at the mercy of any skilful propagandist who contrives to seize the instruments of information and persuasion. Resistance to suggestion can be built up in two ways. First, children can be taught to rely on their own internal resources and not to depend on incessant stimulation from without. This is doubly important. Reliance on external stimulation is bad for the character. Moreover, such stimulation is the stuff with which propagandists bait their hooks, the jam in which dictators conceal their ideological pills. An individual who relies on external stimulations thereby exposes himself to the full force of whatever propaganda is being made in his neighbourhood. For a majority of people in the West, purposeless reading, purposeless listening-in, purposeless looking at films have become addictions, psychological equivalents of alcoholism and morphinism. Things have come to such a pitch that there are many millions of men and women who suffer real distress if they are cut off for a few days or even a few hours from newspapers, radio music, moving pictures. Like the addict to a drug, they have to indulge their vice, not because the indulgence gives them any active pleasure, but because, unless they indulge, they feel painfully subnormal and incomplete. Without papers, films and wireless they live a diminished existence; they are fully themselves only when bathing in sports news and murder trials, in radio music and talk, in the vicarious terrors, triumphs and eroticisms of the films. Even by intelligent people, it is now taken for granted that such psychological addictions are inevitable and even desirable, that there is nothing to be alarmed at in the fact that the majority of civilized men and women are now incapable of living on their own spiritual resources, but have become abjectly dependent on incessant stimulation from without. Recently, for example, I read a little book in which an eminent American biologist gives his view about the Future. Science, he prophesies, will enormously increase human happiness and intelligence – will do so, among other ways, by providing people with micro-cinematographs which they can slip on like spectacles whenever they are bored. Science will also, no doubt, be able very soon to supply us with micro-pocket-flasks and micro-hypodermic-syringes, micro-alcohol, micro-cigarettes and micro-cocaine. Long live science!