The good man, man who infects hardly anyone, is man who has fewest lapses of attention. Albert Camus, The Plague Ours is an age characterized by obsession with watching, but an inability to attend. The two activities, so frequently thought to be synonymous, are, under closer investigation, contraries. That is to say, industrialized, capitalistic, Western world, in continual quest for (creating and viewing) new spectacles is in a state of perpetual distractedness, negating possibility for any genuine attention. This tendency is due to a number of factors, not least of which are relatively recent advances of technologies, mass media, communications, and prevailing, monopolizing culture of entertainment. Our own medical and psychological specialists have recognized this trend. While they have discussed this distractedness in recent years primarily as an issue of intellectual capacity (or thereof) in framework of psychological or neurological abnormalities, other, arguably more significant, effects and implications of our cultural attention-deficiency have yet to be investigated to any serious degree. Decades ago, however, Simone Weil (1909-1943) sensed inherent dangers of individual persons-and societies at large-that fail to be attentive. Not only do her religious essays on attention provide us with a language for such an investigation,1 but also her political works give us a fresh insight that would reveal distraction as not simply an individual intellectual problem, but also a fundamentally social/ethical one as well. What we discover is that certain economic and educational conditions supplant paradigm of watching and showing for much more difficult and beautiful paradigm of regard, attention, and love. In this essay I want, first, to explore moral dimensions of distractedness, and second, to consider whether and in what way(s) distractedness may be disseminated and socialized, implanted into very fabric of a political/economic structure. Moral Dimensions of Distractedness In recent decades, it is psychologists and psychiatrists who have been paying more attention to distraction, especially as it is deemed relevant to now-ubiquitous Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It is perhaps not surprising that ADHD has become (somewhat dubious) leading self-diagnosis as cause of everything from job failure to divorce to any lack of success in general, and even to crime.2 Notably absent from discussions of attention-deficiency is any mention of morality/immorality, or character of agent. Indeed, distraction has largely been analyzed as a symptom or effect of some greater neurological or psychological disorder that may coincide with impulsiveness and moral failure; distraction has not been considered a symptom of moral failure, and certainly has not been viewed as synonymous with it. While Simone Weil did write about l'attention on numerous occasions, she almost never raised concept of la distraction. We do know that Weil was influenced by Blaise Pascal, and in his discussion of diversion, we find germ of what is to become her notion of imagination. In Pensees, Pascal writes: Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. . . . The only good thing for men therefore is to be diverted from thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their mind off it, or by some novel and agreeable passion which keeps them busy, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show, in short by what is called diversion.3 How like Weil's statement that the thought of death calls for a counterweight, and this counterweight - apart from grace - cannot be anything but a lie, wherein this counterweight is a reference to imagination, that filler of void, that liar!4 As a mental faculty, such imagination accurately captures response of one who finds herself in any manner of an unpleasant situation (death of a loved one, confronting her own error, etc. …