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#2714
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Why are some people good, and others not?
Is it possible to learn to be good?
"How good you feel after a meal! How content you are with yourself and the world! Some people, based on their own experience, claim that a clear conscience makes a person cheerful and satisfied, but a full stomach does just as well, and moreover, it's cheaper and requires less effort. After a substantial, well-digested meal, you feel like such a generous, tolerant, noble, and kind person!
It's strange how much our digestive organs control our minds. We can't think, we can't work if our stomach doesn't want to. It controls all our passions and emotions. After a pork chop with eggs, it says: work; after a steak and porter: sleep; and after a cup of tea (two spoons per cup, steeped for no more than three minutes), it commands the brain: now get up and show what you're capable of. Be eloquent, profound, and gentle. Look with a clear eye at nature and life. Spread the white wings of trembling thought and fly, like a godlike spirit, above the noisy light, soaring between the long rows of burning stars towards the gates of eternity.
After hot pastries, it says: be dull and mindless, like an animal in a field, be a brainless creature with an indifferent gaze, in which there shines no life, no imagination, no hope, no fear, no love. And after brandy, consumed in the right amount, it commands: now fool around, laugh, and dance so that your neighbors laugh; babble nonsense, make meaningless sounds; show how helpless a poor creature becomes when its mind and will are drowned, like kittens, in a few gulps of alcohol.
We are all miserable slaves to our stomachs. Don't strive to be moral and just, friends! Carefully observe your stomach, feed it with reason and care. Then satisfaction and virtue will reign in your heart without any effort on your part; you will become a good citizen, a loving husband, a tender father – a noble, pious person." J.K. Jerome