r/alifeuntangled

A farmer in 1929 with a brilliant distinction:

>Work is doing something that you have to do.
When you're doing something that you want to do, you like to do, that's play.

He's unsentimental. He isn’t pretending life was easier, or that the past was purer. He simply seems to have found a way of seeing effort without resentment.

And his old-world scepticism about progress is timeless: modern inventions "bother us and help us."

Every age tends to think it's living at the peak of history. Maybe wisdom is knowing that every age has its burdens, its comforts, and its illusions.

Some things change. Some things remain. The sun still rises in the east and sets in the west.

>The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. Men must be bribed to build up and do good by the offer of an opportunity to hurt and pull down. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

— Aldous Huxley, 1933, in his introduction to an edition of Samuel Butler's Erewhon

Huxley is warning that one of the most psychologically seductive things about a "good cause" is that it can sometimes give people permission to behave badly while still feeling morally pure.

This connects with the “dark-ego-vehicle principle”: the idea that moral, political, or social causes can be used as vehicles for ego needs — status, domination, moral superiority, attention, or conflict — rather than genuine concern for the cause itself.

The point is not that standing by an important cause is inherently narcissistic. Many people are motivated by real compassion, principle and justice.

But Huxley's warning is that once we feel righteous, we can become less aware of our own moral flaws.

Jane Goodall's final message on hope, responsibility, and the role each of us plays on this planet.

Every life matters. Every day makes some difference. And each of us has some role to play in protecting what is still beautiful in this world.

Credit: Famous Last Words: Dr. Jane Goodall — Netflix.

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned that humanity's increasing power over nature could become something far more unsettling: power over human beings themselves.

The danger, for Lewis, was not science or technology as such, but the loss of any deeper moral framework capable of guiding their use.

As our ability to control the world increases — through AI, biotechnology, psychology, surveillance, and social engineering — his warning feels less like nostalgia and more like prophecy.

Source: C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)

George Price is one of those figures whose life is hard to compress into a short post.

Born in New York in 1922, Price was an American chemist, science writer, and mathematical outsider who arrived in London in the late 1960s searching for a major scientific breakthrough.

While studying the evolution of social behaviour, Price developed what became known as the Price equation: a mathematical way of describing how traits change across generations.

Its importance was not only technical. It became deeply connected to one of the most difficult questions in evolutionary biology:

Why does altruism exist?

Why would an organism sacrifice itself for another? Why would selflessness survive in a world supposedly governed by competition, survival, and reproductive advantage?

On one level, Price's work helped bring altruism inside the logic of natural selection. Acts that appear selfless could be analysed in terms of fitness, kinship, genetic transmission, and evolutionary advantage.

But that's where the subject becomes uncomfortable.

Because human altruism is not only something we observe from the outside as behaviour. It is also something we experience from within as our conscience. We carry an expectation that we should be cooperative, considerate, loving, and selfless — even when we fail those ideals.

That makes altruism more than a technical problem. It goes right to the heart of what being human really means.

Price himself seemed unable to leave the question at the level of mathematics.

After helping formalise the evolutionary logic of altruism, he converted to Christianity and began giving away his possessions, devoting himself to helping homeless men around London. At one point, broke and living in increasingly desperate circumstances, he reportedly wrote to friend and evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith:

>“John, I’m down to my last 15p, and I can’t wait to get rid of the last 15.”

It is a devastating line. The man who had helped explain selflessness as a biological phenomenon seemed to be trying to prove, through his own life, that altruism could be more than disguised self-interest.

He died by suicide in 1975.

It's simplistic to say his equation caused his tragedy. His life was complicated — there was illness, depression, religious visions, psychological instability. But the shape of the story remains tragic.

I think what's interesting is the fault line in modern thought that Price's life shines a light on. Science can describe mechanisms by which altruistic behaviour may evolve. It can analyse selflessness in terms of genes, fitness, selection, and survival. But whether that fully explains our moral nature is another question.

Price stood at the point where biology, conscience, religion, guilt, and goodness all collide.

His life is not proof that altruism is merely selfish. Nor is it proof that unguarded self-sacrifice is psychologically simple or socially sustainable. It is a reminder that the human moral sense remains one of the fascinating and difficult things to explain from a mechanistic perspective.

I think the question is: can science fully explain altruism, or does our human conscience point to something deeper in human nature?

https://www.thefactsite.com/day/june-23/

June 23rd, 1946: Albert Einstein famously reflects on the dawning of the nuclear age, capturing a dark truth about humanity: while science can manipulate the most complex elements of the universe, it cannot easily alter or control the destructive impulses inherent in human nature.

Quotes from Oppenheimer (2023) Movie:

J. Robert Oppenheimer: When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world.

Albert Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?

J. Robert Oppenheimer: I believe we did.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/quotes/