This is a lovely world, he sighed. And yet it has suffered horror. Sometimes, so-called civilization seems bent on destroying those very things which… - David Brin

Trouble is synonymous with being a metabolizing entity.

How might our world be different, if our literature, to say nothing of our politics, behaved more like a rational, intrepid adult than a hand-wringing adolescent?

Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same thing — that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty. That one can never know complete truth about physical reality via our senses alone. Much is made of the differences between their systems... Socrates teaching reason, Buddha urging meditation, and Jesus prescribing faith. But what they all had in common was far more important. Each of those sage-prophets worried that the power of human egotism tends to make us lie to ourselves, leading to error, hypocrisy, and all too often, the rationalization of evil actions.