Simone Weil wrote that “the one thing that man possesses that is essentially individual, that is absolutely his own, is his capacity to think.” And yet in the million years our species has trod the earth, this “essentially individual” capacity has never been developed individually. Babies who are left alone learn nothing. This is, sadly, not just a hypothesis. Historians have all too much confirmatory evidence—from the Gulag, for example, or from the orphanages of communist Romania.
