One of the most difficult problems in our society today is to get a message in from outside. We believe in our power to make ourselves.

Consequently, potentially constructive disagrees have been driven to dissent out of pure frustration. And now, Boorstin writes, when the spirit of dissent "seeks the dignity and privilege of disagreement" it is "entitled to neither."

Why is that? Must the dissenter remain isolated in a closed circle of "vagrancy and uncertainty?" Must Boorstin's Consumption Community and his radical New Barbarians be polarized in two similarly illusive yet conflicting worlds of "self-fulfilling prophecies?"

Boorstin accuses the dissenters of rejecting experience for sensation. Yet the two aren't mutually exclusive. The opposite of sensation is non-sensation, and this is what the New Barbarian rejects. In a society which has imposed a model upon humanity, pursuit of sensory awareness is a search for humanity. Boorstin's New Barbarian (Perhaps we might call him the New American?) reacts to the vague but stifling conformity which Boorstin describes so well.

The reaction is a dramatic affirmation of the living organism.

In his prophetic book, The Image, Mr. Boorstin gropes for an answer:

What we need first and now is to disillusion ourselves. What ails us most is not what we have done with America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality. To discover our illusions ... may-help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image.

Read the book; read all his books. You have nothing to lose but your illusions.