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21 " It has become steadily clearer to me that alienation is one of the determining realities of the contemporary age. . . By alienation I mean the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility. The individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it. For a constantly enlarging number of persons, including, significantly, young persons of high school and college age, this state of alienation has become profoundly influential in both behavior and thought. "
― Robert A. Nisbet , The Quest For Community: A Study In The Ethics Of Order And Freedom (Ics Series In Self Governance)
22 " The notion of an impersonal, even hostile society is common--a society in which all actions and motives seem to have equal value and to be perversely detached from human direction. Common too is the helplessness of the individual before alien forces--not the hero who does things, but as Wynham Lewis has put it, the hero to whom things are done. The disenchanted, lonely figure, searching for ethical significance in the smallest of things, struggling for identification with race or class or group, incessantly striving to answer the question, "Who am I, What am I", has become, especially in Europe, almost the central literary type of the age.Not the free individual, but the lost individual; not independence but isolation; not self-discovery but self-obsession; not to conquer but to be conquered; these are the major states of mind in contemporary literature. "