The time — which, looking back, seems so idyllic — is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.
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The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift.
Mankind is made of two kinds of people: wise people who know they’re fools, and fools who think they are wise.
For he who is a corrupter of the laws is more than likely to be a corrupter of the young and foolish portion of mankind.
The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him, although the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp.
As far as the name goes, we may almost say that the great majority of mankind are agreed about this; for both the multitude and the persons of refinement speak of it as happiness, and conceive ‘the good life’ or ‘doing well’ to be the same thing as ‘being happy’.
In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.
If our research leads us to a result that reduces religion to the status of a neurosis of mankind and explains it’s grandiose powers in the same way as we should neurotic obsession in our individual patients, then we may be sure we shall incur in this country the greatest resentment of the powers that be.
May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization — possibly the whole of mankind — have become “neurotic”?
