When I was a teenager I had to stop thinking about the terrible suffering and torture of animals around the world. I found the sheer weight of the feeling of the immensity of it all crushed me.
Now when I read humanity still chasing after money in their billions, still converting the free gift of the world and her resources into a wealth only humans understand or want, and look at the degradation, death and sordid living standards of millions due to this fixation, I again feel the weight crushing me. I know the human beings do not exist who could build a civilisation without buying and selling each other’s time. I know it but I mourn it. I know that though Hazlitt lost the argument about people being generally altruistic I mourn he lost.
And I wonder at all the pain and I see Nature slowly changing as the theory of humanity is so much better than the reality. And yet all the time we pat our collective selves on the back and tell each other how brilliant we are, how rounded is mathematics as it unleashes the knowledge of the universe into our universities and I mourn at the low standard of thinking and ethics of the people who will go into space doing no more than setting up businesses and planting flags.