A good society cannot be built through misery. A long-running and wrong assumption is that the state of the creator and the essence of the created are disconnected. When in reality, there is a one-to-one relationship between the spiritual state of the artist and the art. And in the same way, between the engineer and the machine produced. Not necessarily contained within the physical object, as there are many steps between the design and production of a machine, but in the essence of that machine.

How can we claim that the experience of the creators of culture is secondary to their productivity? The obsession with metrics has driven us into the dirt.

There are many ways by which evil and misery take hold of a society, and we may only find hints in the past - but not its present grasp. Because as human life develops ever more sophistication, the manifestations of evil that create suffering become very subtle and must continually be rediscovered. And when we have “figured out” as a society how to not commit the sins of our ancestors, by “identifying” and “recognizing” where we were wrong in the past, evil slithers elsewhere and finds expression in ways that are not yet culturally discouraged.

For that reason, the multiplicity of today’s technologically driven advances is the breeding ground for new manifestations of misery. Largely undiscovered, and continually developed by hoards of engineers and programmers, many of whom I know personally, who create through a dutiful misery, a self-maintained mental slavery, which operates continually once the creator is calibrated through the soul-crushing educational systems - which reward cold, calculated performance and punish sensitivity to emotion, feeling itself.

Even war should be fought peacefully.

Yesterday I began reading the Tao Te Ching. Inspired by Verse 18:

When the great Tao is forgotten,

Kindness and morality arise.

When wisdom and intelligence are born,

The great pretense begins.

When there is no peace within the family,

Filial piety and devotion arise.

When the country is confused and in chaos,

Loyal ministers appear.

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