Meanwhile, everyone has a constant desire to make the world less than it is, and this desire is the most hurtful thing in humanity. The lessening of reality is contempt. It includes the hope to see things as ugly, repellent, shoddy, and people as stupid, mean, and fake, because that way we can feel we are superior to them all. But it also includes our making reality smaller, narrower than it is, dismissing huge portions of it, making so many things and people insignificant. Most people go through life choosing to see a few things and persons as important, and everything else as insignificant.
People make their family important, and most other humans quite unimportant.
A person sees baseball or his career as important and all the emotion on all the continents of earth, all the years of human thought, are things he does not feel he needs to bother about. And the answer was yes because that thing was now in the person s mind. The ego of everyone prefers a smaller world, because the smaller we make the world, the less we feel we need to respect it, and the more we feel we can run it. It also makes us mean. He showed that all the brutality in the world including racism and Nazism, economic exploitation, the desire to drop bombs on places where other human beings live all this begins with the ordinary lessening that men and women engage in every day.