So…Transcendentalism
is the topic, I suppose?
I guess
I know a bit on the topic. I mean, I was
in APUSH. I did take the role of Ralph
Waldo Emerson in a roleplay. What else
is there to learn?
Well,
Transcendentalism confuddles me, because some things I agree with, and some
things I don’t.
What do
I agree with? Individualism. That’s the big one. I believe that anyone can be anything if they’re
willing to get up and work for it. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “A Psalm of Life”, in which he practically orders
everyone to get up and live. I guess I
could go Shawshank Redemption on this, with Red’s quote “Get busy living, or
get busy dying.” Now, living off of
welfare your entire life and doing nothing about it (which is more common than
you think) is just a waste of life. You
could’ve been something if you’d have tried.
You could at least have not been a drain on taxpayer money.
But
then, I disagree with the Transcendentalist belief that people are inherently
good. I believe they’re inherently selfish. That shows with the welfare example. Those people don’t care about anyone but
themselves. They want to live off of
other people’s hard-earned money, which isn’t really living at all, it’s being
a parasite.
Don’t
be a parasite. "Get busy living or get busy dying."
I think your last part, about parasitic people being inherently selfish connects with the This is Water example of a default setting. Where I think this comparison ends is where Wallace is saying that a person, you can challenge your default setting, but you think that as it part of human nature, you cannot change it. And, on a slightly unrelated note, is a person selfish if they're just surviving? If person a and person b are stuck on an island, and there's only enough water for one to survive (splitting it results in both dead), and person a takes the water because he (or she) found it first, is that selfish? Either one dies, or both after all. I don't think it's selfish; I think it's survival. So, I don't think humans are inherently selfish (although I do think they are sometimes), I think they're--we're--just hardwired to survive.
ReplyDeleteA. Survival is selfish
ReplyDeleteB. Living off of welfare isn't comparable to finding anything first. It's more like being Person B and stealing water from person A so they both end up dead eventually.
The Shawshank Redemption quote was a nice touch. :) And I thought welfare was a very interesting choice to prove both of your points: the necessity of individualism (a point on which you agree with transcendentalists), and the selfish nature of man (on which you disagree with transcendentalists). People need to stop trudging through life like they are always entitled to something and become self-made men.
ReplyDeleteI am not surprised at the conservative aura this post emanates, haha. I take note of the callous referral to "those people" who receive welfare checks. And I don't believe that the stereotypical image of the drunken father with 4 kids running around is more common than I think. Whilst my harsh comment could be my inner liberal viewpoint showing, I still think that this post is a bit haughty and not well built in itself.
ReplyDeleteIt's actually more common to see a single mother who does marijuana on welfare than it is to see a drunken father on welfare...I don't think the drunken father is more common than you think, either. It's okay, I wrote a paper on welfare last year, I know all the statistics. It's really not just speculation.
ReplyDelete