Deny people meaning and value, and you won’t get any closer to utopia. Instead, you will create a soulless society, a state of nature in which life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Such people may be able to compute, but they won’t be capable of thinking beyond the moment or of valuing anything for its own sake.

Deny people meaning and value, and you won’t get any closer to utopia. Instead, you will create a soulless society, a state of nature in which life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Such people may be able to compute, but they won’t be capable of thinking beyond the moment or of valuing anything for its own sake.