There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World

by Carlo Rovelli

It was a dream of building a world where there would be no huge social inequalities, no male domination of women: a place without borders, without armies, without poverty. It was the idea of replacing all competitive struggle for power with cooperation, of leaving behind the bigotries, fascisms, nationalisms, the narrow identitarianism that had led the preceding generations to exterminate one hundred million human beings in two world wars. These were far-reaching dreams, envisaging a world without private property, without envy or jealousy, without hierarchy, without churches, without powerful states, without atomistic closed family units, without dogma. A world, in a word, that was free. Somewhere with no need for the excesses of consumerism, where you could work for pleasure, not for getting, spending or social climbing.