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    "Graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

        An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
        A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
        The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel)."
        —Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1978


EDIT:
"In Ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae was the condemnation of Roman elites and emperors after their deaths. If the Senate or a later emperor did not like the acts of an individual, they could have his property seized, his name erased and his statues reworked. Because there is an economic incentive to seize property and rework statues, historians and archaeologists have had difficulty determining when official damnatio memoriae actually took place, although it seems to have been quite rare."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae


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