William S. Burroughs: "What is the sickness itself?"

I feel there is some hideous new force loose in the world like a creeping sickness, spreading, blighting. Remoter parts of the world seem better now, because they are less touched by it. Control, bureaucracy, regimentation, these are merely symptoms of a deeper sickness that no political or economic program can touch. What is the sickness itself? (130)

--William S. Burroughs, Word Virus (Grove Press: 2000)