A sick society must think much about politics as a sick man must think much about his digestion. (…) if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind; if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else; then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.
There is in fact a fatal tendency in all human activities for the means to encroach upon the very ends which they were intended to serve. Thus money comes to hinder the exchange of commodities, and rules of art to hamper genius, and examinations to prevent young men from becoming learned. (C.S. Lewis in his essay Membership)