Rout or passage

One’s body is one’s home, one’s inviolable refuge, one’s place of rest and renewal. Nonetheless life’ vicissitudes do explicitly demonstrate how this very security can be threatened, compromised or destroyed in a single moment and with no warning. It is from this aleatory element that all those, enamored with power, who have known how to accumulate apparent riches and more and more external means, seek to, if not altogether vanquish and eliminate, at least guard against, prevent or deflect.

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In the historical past of human societies, rare indeed were those who could realize all of their wishes and desires: even a monarch might have some hesitation in placing its own fancies before the needs of its people – although, in certain cultures, a degree of ostentation and glamour is expected of a deified person. It was mostly in the shadow cast by those in power that fortunes could be amassed, but the risk remained of being eventually found out and ruined by some popular rising.

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And so it was while seeking to identify the weaknesses (the irrational wants) of the vast majority so as to invisibly mine and exploit them that a new sort of profiteers developed till there arose a predatory species affranchised from all common moral

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