If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. - Yuval Noah Harari

In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don't know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.

In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in the lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of.

It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.