The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.

-- André Breton

Indeed, when the young André Breton declared that the simplest surrealist act would be to go out into the street and shoot passersby at random, he was anticipating what happened more than once after World War II, when some of the younger generation passed from theory to practice. By absurd and destructive actions, they sought to attain the only possible meaning of existence, after rejecting suicide as the radical solution for the metaphysically abandoned individual.

-- Julius Evola

The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and -- after some hesitation -- the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea.

Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into Epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death.

-- Will Durant

Satan laughing spreads his wings.

-- Black Sabbath