Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

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Doris Lessing. Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Contents

When in the Future They Look Back on Us

You Are Damned, We Are Saved

Switching Off to See Dallas

Group Minds

Laboratories of Social Change

Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind by Communism

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About the Author

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DORIS LESSING

Friedrich Hebbel

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To return to the farmer and his bull. It may be argued that the farmer’s sudden regression to primitivism affected no one but himself and his family, and was a very small incident on the stage of human affairs. But exactly the same can be seen in large events, affecting hundreds or even millions of people. For instance, when British and Italian soccer fans recently rioted in Brussels, they became, as onlookers and commentators continually reiterated, nothing but animals. The British louts, it seems, were urinating on the corpses of people they had killed. To use the word ‘animal’ here seems to me unhelpful. This may be animal behaviour, I don’t know, but it is certainly human behaviour, when humans allow themselves to revert to barbarism, and has been for thousands, probably even millions of years – depending on where one decides to put the beginning of our history as humans, not animals.

In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel.

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