There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.