If we want well-functioning communities, we cannot focus only on social virtues. We must also find a place for antisocial ones. We shouldn’t banish feasting and debauchery to the margins, to be mopped up by police and frowned upon by commentators. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, an occasion on which we’re able to be released from the two great pressures of secular adult life: to be rational and to be faithful. We should be allowed to talk gibberish, tie giant woolen penises to our vestments, and head out into the night to disappear with a stranger and copulate randomly and joyfully, and then return the next morning to our partners, safe in the assurance that it was nothing personal (no more than our apologies on the Day of Atonement), that it was the feast of fools that made us do it. A good community knows just how much there is in us that doesn’t really want community or at least can’t handle it all the time. If we have our feasts of love, we must also have our feasts of fools.

Alain de Botton, “Improvable Feats”