With this in mind, it becomes easier to see what “profoundly sick society” might mean in daily terms. A culture that rewards burnout while calling it ambition can produce people who are impeccably “functional” yet chronically depleted. Likewise, environments that normalize dehumanizing rhetoric may label empathy as weakness and moral hesitation as incompetence.
A small anecdote makes the dynamic concrete: someone leaves a workplace where 70-hour weeks are praised, and only afterward realizes their constant headaches and irritability were treated as personal failings rather than predictable outcomes. In Krishnamurti’s framing, their earlier “adjustment” was not health—it was endurance inside a harmful norm. [...]
