It doesn't hurt to remember............

..................................that the veneer of civilization is mighty thin.

"Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy.  Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another.  These principles have no objective reality."

-Yuval Noah Harari,  Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind