At least that's the conclusion of the World Health Organization's most recent cross-national survey. The WHO study is not the only evidence. Israel has become the world center of trance music. Rave parties, combining the loud, pounding trance music with widespread Ecstasy use, writes Assaf Sagiv in the spring issue of Azure, are modern Bacchanalia. Participants in the ancient Dionysian rites entered into a frenzy, in which they lost all inhibitions, all sense of self.
Trance music reflects the same desire for the annihilation of self.
Only those who feel that their brains are of little use seek to lose them. In Sagiv's view, the primary characteristics of Israeli youth are pessimism, passivity, and disengagement, and their music reflects that. They enjoy material wealth beyond the wildest dreams of their parents' generation. Their leaders hold out to them for the first time the promise of peace with our Arab neighbors. Much has to do with lost idealism.