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"Gemeinschaft macht gemein” – “community makes common (crude)” and warned of the dangers of a society where mass-values are so strong that they can deaden even the strongest conscience.
Without an active prayer life we lose strength of character and succumb to what sociologists call herd instinct: we fall prey to fear of others, to ambition, to the desire to please people. Without prayer, the constant traffic and opinions of people around us will swamp our inner lives and finally drown them. We think we are our own masters, but in actual fact many of us cannot think for ourselves, let alone pray, anymore. Having lost its relation to God, our life consists merely (to quote Nietzsche again) of “constant adjustments to all sorts of different collective influences and societal demands.”"