Homo homini lupus est, as one inspired Latin saying has it. But man has long ceased being a wolf to man. Man is not even an image-maker to man, as some modern sociologists assume. It is all far more terrifying and much simpler than that. Man is wow to man – or if not to man, then to precisely another such wow, the result of which is that, projected on to the modern system of cultural coordinates the Latin saying becomes: ‚Wow Wow Wow!‘

Ω Ω Ω

It should be remembered that the word ‚democracy‘, which is used so frequently in the modern mass media, is by no means the same word ‚democracy‘ as was so widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two words are merely homonyms. The old word ‚democracy‘ was derived from the Greek ‚demos‘, while the new word is derived from the expression ‚demo-version‘.

—Victor Pelevin, Babylon, (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited, 2000), 90.