From ‘The Devils of Loudun’ by Aldous Huxley: 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 ’… Adrenalin addiction is rationalised as Righteous Indignation and finally, like the prophet Jonah, they are convinced, unshakably, that they do well to be angry. Looking back and up, from our vantage point on the descending road of modern history, we now see that all the evils of religion can flourish without any belief in the supernatural, that convinced materialists are ready to worship their own jerry built creations as though they were the Absolute, and that self-styled humanists will persecute their adversaries with all the zeal of Inquisitors. Such behaviour-patterns antedate and outlive the beliefs which, at any given moment, seem to motivate them. In order to justify their behaviour, they turn t...
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