I have always subscribed to the belief that had I been young in 1916 I would have been a Communist eager to free the serfs and build a just society in Russia and I would have been one of the first to be shot when Lenin destroyed the ideal by creating a dictatorship. I am actually sure that I wouldn’t have survived very long in any of the fascist states that have existed since the beginning of human society for any of a number of reasons, but certainly amongst them would be my adherence to the belief that life itself is the only sacred thing there is.
So much of our education is designed to teach us how to get on, make good, have fulfilled lives by being ‘successful’, and successful always means having ‘enough’ money, when actually it should be about how we empower those with no power. Because we are powerful enough to kill anything and anyone, ethics must exist in our allowing things to live. It is not ethical to keep slaves, it is not ethical to build wealth upon the backs of slaughter, it is not ethical to lie to ourselves that society is inherently good because it keeps us alive at the expense of everything else that lives.
Either we are not ethical animals we just pretend to be, or the way we are living is wrong.