Why should we not be happier than we are? Why accept the miseries of religious dread, or patriarchal cruelty, or unreason, rather than just take it on ourselves to find a better way to live? That was Zamenhof’s hope in inventing his language. And as Bertrand Russell wrote, “It is not the whole duty of man to slip through the world so as to escape the wrath of God. The world is our world, and it rests with us to make a heaven or a hell.”
