Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site rand-unix.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!sdcsvax!sdcrdcf!rand-unix!edhall From: edhall@rand-unix.UUCP Newsgroups: net.women,net.singles Subject: Re: Never stop fighting Message-ID: <1819@rand-unix.UUCP> Date: Mon, 18-Jun-84 14:21:05 EDT Article-I.D.: rand-uni.1819 Posted: Mon Jun 18 14:21:05 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 21-Jun-84 05:53:53 EDT References: <414@ubc-vision.CDN> Organization: Rand Corp., Santa Monica Lines: 55 Xref: 889 512 | To be nobody but yourself in a world | | which is doing its best night and day | | to make you like everybody else | | means to fight the hardest battle | | any human being can fight and | | never stop fighting. | | | | E. E. Cummings | [submitted by Farzin Mokhtarian] As much as I like e.e. cummings' poetry, and as fascinating as I find the New England Transcendentalist tradition of which he is a part, I find myself in disagreement with this quotation, as I find it proposes both an obsession with self and an attitude of individual-vs-society. A lot of the alienation, loneliness, and unhappiness that many people experience in our culture comes from our cultural obsession with our selves. We deny the deep emotional need for knowing where we fit in, and instead approach life in terms of what we can obtain to enhance our self-image. Peer pressure, fads, and such all work in terms of our inflamed desire for enhancing our self-concept, and *not*, as is commonly asserted, because of any desire for conformity. Conformity is merely the statistical result of a collection of self-obsessed individuals. I think this trend became starkly apparant in the `me decade' of the 1970's, though I think that it has continued into the 1980's almost unabated. The result of the denial of our innately social natures (where we have made connections between people a matter of self-willed ``relationships'' rather than social manifestations of our inter- dependence) often shows as feelings of purposelessness or alienation. The fabric of society seems thin and increasingly hostile. All sorts of ill-fitting attempts are made to establish a feeling of connection, though achieving true intimacy seems more and more difficult on an individual-to-individual basis, while striving for the feeling of belonging to a group is frustrated by the sense that the group itself is isolated and powerless. It's easy to attack the idea of roles when the evils of current roles have been so well illuminated. But the need isn't to abolish roles, it is to reshape them. Roles are not incompatible with freedom; at least they don't need to be. The anxiety and lack of trust produced by social anarchy are as limiting as any role. But a role of any kind is a prison when coupled with our cultural tendency towards self- obsession, as it becomes a standard of self-measure. I believe that is is such a concern with self-image, and not social role, that forms the prison that e.e. cummings sought to escape. -Ed Hall decvax!randvax!edhall P.S. Obviously, this is all opinion and is brimming with generalizations. Sprinkling my words with caveats to that effect would have weakened them and made this long submission much longer--so no flames pointing out what I already know, please.