“We confront a paradoxical process, then, whose duality - tetanization and inertia, acceleration in a void, overheated production with no attendant social gains or aims - is a reflection of the two phenomena conventionally attributed to the crisis: inflation and unemployment.
Traditionally, inflation and unemployment are variables in the equation of growth. At this level, however, there is really no question of crisis: these phenomena are anomic in character, and anomie is merely the shadow cast by an organic solidarity. What is worrying, by contrast, is anomaly. The anomalous is not a clear symptom but, rather, a strange sign of failure, of the infraction of a rule which is secret - or which, at any rate, we know nothing about. Perhaps an excess of goals is the culprit - we simply do not know. Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.”