Behaving Badly

              
"When [people] are confronted with difficulties, I think they deal with them amazingly well. I was struck by that in the war. People get cross, but then very quickly they would devise something -- they are extremely inventive. I'm sure people are at their best when times are hard. And then if you give people everything, they start behaving very badly. 

Quite a pity."

The English philosopher Mary Midgley, in conversation with Sheila Heti.