Word: meaninglessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Perhaps no social progress can be made while the bombs are falling. But then, all military victories will become meaningless if Saigon cannot command allegiance in the captured territory. The longer American policymakers fail to recognize this paradox, the more difficult the solution will be and the longer the war will...
...Mother (Paulette Goddard, in a series of unflattering closeups) is a faded gentlewoman whose unscrupulous lover (Rod Steiger) has entered a bid for Claudia and the family estates. Meanwhile, an aging adventuress (Shelley Winters) arduously lures young Tomas to her bed. He acquiesces at last because all choices seem meaningless. Ultimately, meaninglessness infects the film as a whole, and Indifference is remarkable only for Steiger's highly concentrated performance as a doughy but vigorous go-getter whose lechery lends an acetylene brilliance to several otherwise dismal scenes...
...wonderment that are his heritage, modern man seems to be doing his best to dismiss death as an unfortunate incident. Carl Jung warned against abandoning the traditional view of death "as the fulfillment of life's meaning and its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation." Psychologist Rollo May feels that the repression of death "is what makes modern life banal, empty and vapid. We run away from death by making a cult of automatic progress, or by making it impersonal. Many people think they are facing death when they are really sidestepping it with...
Alone with his elemental fear of death, modern man is especially troubled by the prospect of a meaningless death and a meaningless life-the bleak offering of existentialism. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," wrote Albert Camus, "and that is suicide." In other words, why stay alive in a meaningless universe? The existentialist replies that man must live for the sake of living, for the things he is free to accomplish. But despite volumes of argumentation, existentialism never seems quite able to justify this conviction on the brink of a death that is only a trap door...
...fundamental issue. The British would give Rhodesia its freedom only on condition that the nation's 4,000,000 blacks be guaranteed control of the government within the foreseeable future. To most of the 220,000 whites, however, that would be suicide. They offered only two meaningless gestures: allowing more blacks to vote for the 15 African seats in parliament, and the creation of an almost powerless senate composed of twelve African chiefs (who depend for their livelihood on the government). Any further freedoms for the blacks were absolutely refused...