Pessimists as victims. – Wherever a deep dissatisfaction with existence comes to prevail, it is the aftereffects of some great dietary mistake made by a people over a long time that are coming to light. Thus the spread of Buddhism (not its origin) depended greatly on the Indians’ excessive and almost exclusive diet of rice and the general enervation resulting from it. Perhaps the modern European discontent is due to the fact that our prehistory, the entire middle ages, was given to drinking thanks to the influence of Germanic tastes on Europe: the middle ages means the alcohol poisoning of Europe. – The German dissatisfaction with life is essentially a winter sickness exacerbated by the effects of cellar air and the noxious stove fumes in German living rooms.