"This explains man's necessarily painful evolution. Ignorance surrounds him at his cradle; therefore, he regulates his acts according to their first consequences, the only ones that, in his infancy, he can see. It is only after a long time that he learns to take account of the others.Two very different masters teach him this lesson: experience and foresight. Experience teaches efficaciously but brutally. It instructs us in all the effects of an act by making us feel them, and we cannot fail to learn eventually, from having been burned ourselves, that fire burns."

The world has strong reasons to be suspect of another era of depression: not because of too much liquidity, not the bankers' greed, not the depredation and widespread violence-it is because of pharmacists. Yes. They have always existed. That has been the most unsolvable problem that we have been puzzling over for ages,even after evolving into our current avatar where we can stare at screens and ignore people all our lives. Pharmacists have been known for their ability to understand cryptic clues from the doctors' prescriptions, which requires using all of their elementary understanding of hash functions, pseudorandom number generation and convex hull algorithms to figure out which medicine would be the most appropriate to not kill the prescription holder: the patient, in other words. In times of war, most of the code-breaking is done with the covert help of pharmacists, though they tend to not acknowledge such trivial pursuits that pale in comparison to any doctor's bestial scribbling.

"Society is the aggregate of all the services that men perform for one another by compulsion or voluntarily, that is to say, public services and private services.The first, imposed and regulated by the law, which is not always easy to change when necessary, can long outlive their usefulness and still retain the name of public services, even when they are no longer anything but public nuisances. The second are in the domain of the voluntary, i.e., of individual responsibility. Each gives and receives what he wishes, or what he can, after bargaining. These services are always presumed to have a real utility, exactly measured by their comparative value.That is why the former are so often static, while the latter obey the law of progress."

I had the good opportunity to knock on a pharmacy wherein there were three hundred million people standing right outside the counter with prescriptions of varying length and paper quality. I needed to cure my itch. No, not the worldly itch of desire, but the physical itch along certain unmentionable spaces and crevices that would make normal people make disgusting faces. I slowly gathered the courage and went up to one of the pharmacists deeply pondering over a prescription and making mental calculations when I told him I wanted a particular anti-fungal cream in a very hushed tone that even I couldn't hear what I said.

He slowly raised his head, peered over my eyes, looked into my soul. 

I felt completely ashamed that I had even had the guts to be born, forget being here all itchy and standing in front of this great community of clean and intelligent pharmacistic beacon of whatever.

He slowly walked back, went to the back of the shop. All was well till then. And then, in that moment, it became clear to me. 

He turned around, looked at me, and in a tone that would have rend the planet asunder, he screamed "Sir, andha *name here* cream illa, vera tharattuma?"

Deafening silence in the shop. All three hundred million of them suddenly stop and look at me with that look of disgust that my college advisor reserved for me when I missed a punctuation on my thesis.

They form a circle, and move away from me. What begins in hushed tones raises to a stentorian shrill cry of "hang him, he is sick." "Lets burn this itchy devil before he consumes us all."

There is no father of a family who does not take it as his duty to teach his children order, good management, economy, thrift, moderation in spending.There is no religion that does not inveigh against ostentation and luxury. Certainly there is a flagrant contradiction here between the moral idea and the economic idea. How many eminent men, after having pointed out this conflict, look upon it with equanimity! This is what I have never been able to understand; for it seems to me that one can experience nothing more painful than to see two opposing tendencies in the heart of man. Mankind will be degraded by the one extreme as well as by the other! If thrifty, it will fall into dire want; if prodigal, it will fall into moral bankruptcy!

My mother has turned against me. I have fallen out of favor with her. The story is most tragic, and I shall muster all the courage because even the gods have ignored me in this melee.

I had a blanket, my most favorite one. I had been using it for more than a decade. The condition of the blanket now, is, I would say, fairly frail. It is a little torn at the edges-by a little torn, I mean it is heavily torn and when I turn to one side while sleeping, the other side of the blanket has a gaping hole, exactly like the one in my heart. 

One fine day, I found that this was missing from the usual stack of pillows and blankets. I was puzzled. I slowly walked around and went to the kitchen, and right down the kitchen sink, my heart sunk:

The blanket, my sweet beloved blanket, the one that had comforted me and kept me warm, the one which I had cuddled against, the one that I made sweet...wait, that is not right. Anyway, I found that it had now been taken from its place of eternal glory only to be used as a dish cloth.  

I have been unable to recover from this, and I know I will find my strength. In times of great trouble, there is nothing you can do but endure.

All lines that are block quoted are from selected essays by Frederic Bastiat. 

http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html