[W]hat transpired in the battlefields of Flanders on Christmas Eve 1914 between tens of thousands of young men had nothing to do with original sin or productive labor. And the pleasure those men sought in each other's company bore little resemblance to the superficial rendering of pleasure offered up by nineteenth-century utilitarians and even less to Freud's pathological account of a human race preoccupied by the erotic impulse.
The men at Flanders expressed a far deeper human sensibility - one that emanates from the very marrow of human existence. ... They chose to be human. And the central human quality they expressed was empathy for one another...
Jeremy Rifkin
