Now she could have gotten killed, when she said to him, how dare you do this to this man who has been so kind to you? I want him back. But by a miracle she wasn’t, by another miracle, she actually eventually obtained my father’s release. And we were able to flee, and I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana, which was one of the two really Shanghai and Cuba that sold entry permits to desperate refugees. And there I witnessed another injustice, this terrible gap in those Batista days between those on top and those on bottom. And all these experiences really led me to questions that I am sure many of us have asked, does it have to be this way? When we humans have such an enormous capacity for caring, for consciousness, for creativity, why has there been so much insensitivity, cruelty, destructiveness?
Is it, as we’re often told, whether it’s selfish genes or original sin, which is really the same story, right? We’re bad, have to be controlled from the top, or is there an alternative? And my research many years later sought to answer that question, and the answer to whether there is an alternative was resounding yes, but we can’t see it looking through the lenses that we’ve inherited from what I call more rigid domination times.”