Ilkay

“Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

“I have asked them to pay attention to what they have just said. In particular to their use of the phrase “mental illness”. While it is true, i continued, that people in deprived situations are likely to suffer a great deal more than those who are more affluent, on what grounds are we correct to use medical language to describe that suffering? Do we use it because we have simply been taught to use it or because we have objective that it is somehow better to medicalise such suffering than it is to view it as many social scientists might as non-medical, non-pathological yet understandable human response to harmful social, relational, political and environmental conditions?”
― James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

“What we need is a profound rethinking of the nature of suffering itself, and what it is trying to highlight and ask us to change. We need to repoliticise emotional discontent in the minds of teachers, parents and policy-makers, rather than continue reducing it to dysfunctions that allegedly reside within the self. We need to acknowledge that suffering also reflects family/socio/political dynamics we would do well to better acknowledge and address.”
― James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

“...all sentient beings capable of suffering should constitute a solidarity against suffering. Out of this solidarity, we should refrain from doing anything that could increase the overall amount of suffering and confusion in the universe.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self