Battered and deadened

“All idea of a true value – of any scale except for the pragmatic scale of hypnotism and hoax - is banished for ever from the life of the of the great majority of an advertising zone, such as any great modern city. They are now almost entirely incapable of anything except sensation; for to think is to be able to traverse the scale of values from the nadir to the zenith.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. II, p. 13.