they’re cushioning themselves for an awful kind of gesturing life, it seems to me. I’ve known people who stop participating as soon as they’re forty. Mostly Republicans, of course. I’m always puzzled by people whose social and political values change as they get older - people who get more conservative. The desire to accumulate comfort and wealth - that’s deadening.”
-Edward Albee
(from How To Live by Henry Alford)
I think one could make an argument for war and it’s usefulness in giving life meaning in such circumstances where hardships cannot otherwise be found—-or where they are too abundant.
One could? I don’t think I’d find it terribly valid.
Well, if the desire to accumulate comfort and wealth is deadening, then the constant upheaval of war and the poverty it brings would be… livening?
It would be no less valid than that quote of Edward Albee’s. No, I don’t think that the desire to accumulate wealth and comfort is in itself deadening; life is deadening. The accumulation of wealth and comfort is a means to ensure the continuance of life. It is the harvesting of resources, the nesting; it is primal and essential. What else is there? Welfare? Pass that wealth around so you can feel like a better person? And then what: make everyone else do it, too? After all, you are making their lives ‘less deadening’. Kill all the lawyers, is that right?
I know what he meant when he said that, but I can’t help but feel that he has missed something essential: justice. Perhaps it is a bit classical of me, but it seems to me that to impose one’s will upon another is injustice.
My point in saying that one could make an argument for war was rhetorical, and meant to be invalid—-sort of (I don’t think invalid is the word—-there are many justifications for war, and economics is certainly one of them).
I’m done with following society’s bandwagon when it comes to shit like that. I really don’t care about utopia anymore. The people in this world are literally too dumb to go without war. War occupies them; war gives their life meaning. Not just war, but hardship, I mean. And they give meaning to the lives of thinkers, perhaps without them noticing it. They give them conflicts to negotiate, and problems to solve.
I fucking hate war, but I just don’t realistically see how calling it bad and slapping anyone who talks about it in the face is going to help stop it, nor do I see how stopping it would necessarily make things better. And perhaps those who isolate themselves as soon as they’re forty, do so for a reason. OH, the grand unification of the human race—-what is human? What right does anyone have to make people collectivize?
Soooooo, yeeeeeaaaaaaah. If anyone has even read this far. . . I was going to ask you what the fuck this bonehead is talking about, because I didn't even read it all the way through. I gave an eye-roll once and then fell asleep. People like this are sooooo annoying. Everything this kid posts is either like this or just more rambling shit about how great he is. Remember being 21? LOL.
