Once, in the Twilight Zone, a gangster died and woke up in a swank hotel, where a butler told him, "You can have anything you want, anytime you want it." After a week or so, the gangster got sick of high living and asked to be sent to the other place -- to which the butler responded, "This is the other place." (Cut to maniacal laugh, closing credits.)
If we all understand this story, and see its obvious truth, why is so much of our ethical and political discourse framed in terms of finding out what you want, getting what you want, making sure that lots of people get most of what they want? Why is the tragedy of the world so often put this way: some people get what they want, and they don't care about the other people who don't get what they want? If the ''haves" cared, just a little bit, we could have a world in which everybody got most of what he or she wanted. And that would be a great world!
An ethic of service built around what other people want has the same basic conceptual problem as a policy of selfishness, built around what I want. And extending the whole confusion into eternity -- the place where, if you were good, you get what you want, and if you were bad, you get what want not to have -- just makes the problem more obvious.
There's a Christian revival coming to town. People are going to get some help in going to heaven and in avoiding hell. But will they get any real help in telling the two apart.
Posted by shea0017 at August 2, 2004 10:31 AMI'm reading the blog from recent to past since that's the way it shows up on my screen, but came to a stop when I got to the comment " if the haves cared just a little bit..." The problem seems to me to be that few of us, with the notable excpetion of Zell Kravinsky, seem to place ourselves in the "haves" category. It seems far easier to judge others to have a lot, but us, we still don't feel that we have enough, or at least what we deserve. My experience says that most of us are in the "halves" category--we want at least another half before we would have enough. The problem of course is that the size of the half we want increases in proportion to the half that we have.
Posted by: Lynn at August 11, 2004 8:32 AMEvery few days I read the blog backwards, since that's how it shows up on my screen. Today I stopped at the words "if the 'haves' cared, just a little bit... One problem is that the "haves" maybe see ourselves more as "halves." Instead of feeling that we have enough, the feeling is of having about half of what we've worked for or deserve. The problem, of course, is that the half that is missing keeps increasing in size in proportion to the half that we have.
Posted by: Lynn Englund at August 11, 2004 8:40 AMWe are put here to help each other, we all have the tools for it. And it is life itself. Everything that works agaist that creates unhappiness.
Posted by: Austin at June 8, 2005 3:06 AM