Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

The microwave, the waste disposal, the orgasmic elasticity of carpets: this soft, resort-style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world. All their activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them: these Californian scholars with monomaniacal passions for things French or Marxist, the various sects obsessively concerned with chastity or crime, these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadows that have escaped from Plato's cave, the very real mental defectives or mongols let out of the psychiatric hospitals (this letting loose of the mad into the city seems a pure sign of the end of the world, the loosing of the seals of the Apocalypse)
J. Baudrillard, America, 31.