I share this one without comment.
Indeed I am always expecting to hear that a scientific campaign has been opened against Sleep. Sooner or later the Prohibitionists will turn their attention to the old tribal traditional superstition of Sleep; and they will say that the sluggard is merely encouraged by the cowardice of the moderate sleeper. There will be tables of statistics, showing how many hours of output are lost by miners, smelters, plumbers, plasterers, and every trade in which (it will be noted) men have contracted the habit of sleep; tables showing the shortage of aconite, alum, apples, beef, beetroot, bootlaces, etc., and other statistics carefully demonstrating that work of this kind can only rarely be performed by sleep-walkers. There will be all the scientific facts, except one scientific fact. And that is the fact that if men do not have Sleep, they go mad.
-G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows
How prophetic. Only, our society is so far gone in it’s total-work culture that the citizen is demanding what the tyrant would command… or will…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/goodnight-sleep-clean.html?_r=0
That article is really interesting. Chesterton saw it coming a long way off. I also thought it was interesting that sleep is something that gives evolutionists issues.
Yes, that was interesting.
I find it interesting that when you work off of an evolutionist world-view, you understand the world as having only pragmatic purposes. If it cannot serve a “grabbing”/”keeping” agenda, then it seems meaningless to evolutionists, and is thus a problem for them. It is very supportive of the “total-work world” that Joseph Pieper talked about in “Leisure, the Basis of Culture”.