Gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent development of the normal.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A lot of money is spent trying to keep people alive who don't necessarily want to be alive.
I suspect that a huge amount of the anxiety and suffering that we see around can be closely traced to our wanton misuse of our resources. Just look at any garbage dump and see what is wasted. In a sense, we've wasted our souls.
As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.
We're adding a billion people every decade. We're just spin doctors. Whatever we do is supposedly great, and yet it's always at the expense of diversity and nature. We're like elephants. The ecology of the elephant is more similar to human than any other.
It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
Many of the technologies we've invented are necessary to keep 6.5 billion people alive. We can't go back from that, so we need to decarbonize really rapidly.
Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle - but that's exactly what art is for.
The tragedy is that there is so much more incentive - money - to destroy the ecology than there is to preserve it.
Human beings have enormous resilience.