“…it seems to me very unlikely that most of the human beings who have ever lived, doing work they needed to do to get their food, clothing and shelter and to maintain the structures of their community life, thought of this work as being a ‘struggle for survival.’ Is a person ‘struggling’ when he raises food which he will eat, or make clothing, or builds or fixes his dwelling? The notion is absurd.†(P. 62-63)
I’ve seen the phrase ‘struggle for survival’ used a few times. But what he points out here had never occurred to me. We can look back at life a couple centuries ago and come to the conclusion that they did struggle to survive compared to our life. I’m sure that at the time, people didn’t think of it that way. Do many people today talk about their own life as a struggle for survival?
In whatever age, life was what it was. There were periods of history where getting past the age of 45 was to have long life. Consider the people who live in remote areas of Nepal. It is the only life they have ever known.
“The trouble with modern man seems to me that he has made himself dependent on institutions that he can neither know nor control.. More and more he is not able, or even permitted, to act to meet his own basic needs. He can’t keep himself from getting ‘obese’ … without a committee of experts telling him how to do it.†(P. 63)
The way I’ve been doing these articles is that I pick out the quotes on the first read and then go back later, get the quotes and write based on the quotes alone. In this chapter, I’m not really sure that what I think of when reading the quotes is necessarily the main point of the chapter. I realized that in our society for most people the struggle is not over basic necessities but over things beyond our control. When I consider things like stress, I’ve found that it really grows out of situations where I have too little control.
As a family we avoid dependence on institutions where possible. An example is that we have never bought anything on the 6 months no interest no payments plan.
On the subject of life struggles – I think it is all in your definition of struggle, too. For example, however misguided, the suburbanite with the Hummer and a million things on “six months no interest no payments” is going through a self-inflicted struggle. Hmmm…do you think that “struggle” on one level or another is something of a basic human need – we need to be challenged in order to feel valued? And in modern life many people end up in inappropriate struggles. Just a thought.
On the subject of institutional dependence – I can agree there, too. Plus, as I said elsewhere, institutions have no souls and as a result can do things that everyone involved feels is wrong but nobody is empowered to fix. For example, after your six months no interest no payments on your new car and two months of making payments you get temporarily laid off for two months. Someone with a soul would figure out a way to make it work so that you kept the car that you’d need to get to work after the layoff. An institution sends over the repo man even though many people in the institution can totally understand your problem.