Hence it was absolutely to be expected that my commune would be destroyed. It was against the church, it was against the state; it was against all that your so-called civilization stands for – because I don’t believe man has yet become civilized. If man has become civilized, then there is no need for wars; if man has become civilized, then there is no need for discrimination between blacks and whites, men and women; if man has become civilized then there is no need for people to die because they have nothing to eat – and there are people who are dying because they have too much to eat. In America, thirty million people are dying from overeating, and thirty million people are dying because they have nothing to eat.

And you call this world a civilized world? It is not even sane. And it cannot be just coincidence: exactly thirty million people overeating, knowing perfectly well that they are eating themselves to death, knowing perfectly well that thirty million people are on the streets dying without food. Strange: sixty million people can be saved within a second, but these sixty million people will die.

I have heard: a man was very worried because his wife was getting fatter and fatter and fatter.

And women have greater capacity for becoming fatter than men – it is a biological privilege, because the woman has to be able to become pregnant, to become a mother; then for nine months she cannot eat well, she throws up, she is carrying such a load in her belly. And every day the child needs more and more food. It is a very strange situation: the woman cannot eat, and the child wants more food because he is growing. Hence nature has made woman’s body capable of collecting more fat for emergency measures. So even if she does not eat, the child can get as much as he needs from the reserve fat the woman has; and the woman can also go on eating her own fat. And nine months is a long time, so the woman has immense capacity. If she uses her full capacity, then man is no competitor.

And women are thinner while they are not married. Once they are married they start becoming fat, because now there is no problem. They have got hold of a man who cannot escape, so it does not matter what happens to their body proportions; they are no longer interested in any beauty competition.

The man asked his doctor, “What has to be done?”

The doctor said, “Do one thing: take a beautiful picture of a naked woman and paste it inside the fridge, so whenever your wife opens the fridge for more ice cream she will think, ‘What a beautiful body.’ And she may start thinking about herself, that this is not good.”

The man said, “That idea is very good.”

After two months the doctor met the man, and he could not believe it. He said, “What happened? I have not seen you for two months, and you have become so fat!”

The man said, “Everything went wrong because of your suggestion, you idiot! Are you my doctor or my enemy? I pasted a beautiful woman, naked, inside the fridge. Since then my wife does not open the fridge, but I cannot remain more than fifteen minutes away before a desire arises to see the photo. But when one opens the fridge, it is not just the photo one sees – the ice cream, the cake… You have destroyed my life. So my wife has become slimmer, beautiful, and I have become ugly. And the whole credit goes to you.”