“What society preaches as ‘the good life’ is in fact a systematically organized way of death, not only because it is saturated with what psychologists call an unconscious death wish, but because it actually rests on death. It is built on the death of the nonconformist, the alien, the odd ball, the enemy, the criminal. It is based on war, on imprisonment, on punitive methods which include not only mental and physical torture but, above all, the death penalty.”
– Thomas Merton’s introduction to The Plague by Albert Camus
