The non-essential is needed for your madness

Ninety percent of industry is involved with the non-essential. Fifty percent of human labor is wasted on that which is not useful in any way. Fifty percent of industry is devoted to the feminine mind, rather, feminine body: designing new dresses every three months, designing new houses, clothes, powders, soaps, creams; fifty percent of industry is devoted to such nonsense. And humanity is starving, people are dying without food, and half of humanity is interested in the absolutely non-essential.

To reach the moon is absolutely non-essential. If we were a little wiser we would not even think about it. It is absolutely foolish wasting as much money as could feed the whole earth. Wars are non-essential, but humanity is mad, and it needs wars more than food. It needs to go to the moon more than food, more than clothes, more than the essential, because the essential is not enough.

And now science has created the greatest horror, and that horror is that now the essential can be fulfilled very easily. Within ten years, all humanity’s needs can be fulfilled, this whole earth can be satisfied as far as the necessities are concerned. Then what? Then what will you do? […] Within ten years the whole earth can become a hell.

The non-essential is needed for your madness to remain engaged. So moons are not enough, we will have to go further, we will have to go on creating the useless. It is needed. People need it to be occupied.

Osho, The Empty Boat,  Ch 2, (excerpt)