Vonnegut's Philosophy on Extinction

From Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” (1973).

When Kilgore Trout accepted the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979, he declared:

“Some people say there is no such thing as progress. The fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory. Those of you familiar with the nature of my earlier published works will understand why I mourned especially when the last beaver died.

“There were two monsters sharing this planet with us when I was a boy, however, and I celebrate their extinction today. They were determined to kill us, or at least to make our lives meaningless. They came close to success. They were cruel adversaries, which my little friends the beavers were not. Lions? No. Tigers? No. Lions and tigers snoozed most of the time.

The monsters I will name never snoozed. They inhabited our heads. They were the arbitrary lusts for gold, and, God help us, for a glimpse of a little girl’s underpants. “I thank those lusts for being so ridiculous, for they taught us that it was possible for a human being to believe anything, and to behave passionately in keeping with that belief — any belief.

“So now we can build an unselfish society by devoting to unselfishness the frenzy we once devoted to gold and to underpants.”