Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. In fact, this has already happened to him. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed.

“The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations-and absolutely nothing more.

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from the Underground Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. How to explain it? Here’s how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease and that, after all, is the main thing. I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow minded. “For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia – that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms.

Tales from the underground dostoevsky