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There are many people for whom hate and rage pay a higher dividend of immediate satisfaction than love. Congenitally aggressive, they soon become adrenalin addicts, deliberately indulging their ugliest passions for the sake of the 'kick'...Knowing that one self-assertion always ends by evoking other and hostile self-assertions, they sedulously cultivate their truculence...Adrenalin addiction is rationalized as Righteous Indignation and finally, like the prophet Jonah, they are convinced, unshakably, that they do well to be angry.These words first appeared in 1952, in the pages of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. While many of Huxley's works are better known and more widely read, there may be no more relevant text, past or present, to our turbulent era than this account of a seventeenth century witch trial.
Comment: It says a lot about our age, as well as the variability and factors involved in health and mortality, when some so-called first world countries are actually seeing a decline in health and expected life spans: Spain will overtake Japan in world's life expectancy ranking, US set to plunge to 64th by 2040
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