Word: selfish
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...Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sailing accident on the Mediterranean. Back in London, the Gentleman's Magazine harrumphed: "We ought as justly to regret the decease of the Devil." A far different post-mortem came from Lord Byron, who called Shelley "the best and the least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison...
...events of 1968. As in any socialist-realist work the characters must be archetypes. The "positive hero" is a working class Czech guy, who just returned from Syria where he was providing "brotherly help" on an engineering project. The "bad guy" is a son of the exploiting class, "pretentious, selfish and foreign to our country." The fact that he operates as "eminence grise" of various literary and political circles is not "an indication of exceptional gifts, but rather a symptom of an egoistic character, in his case almost innate." Why almost? Isn't it obvious since we learn later that...
...Throughout the play we receive two conflicting messages. The man has been beaten, unjustly deprived of the success to which he had a rightful claim. Here the inequities of this society are clearly to blame. And yet because Brad is so brutal in his treatment of his wife, so selfish in his needs. Wallowing in such endless self-pity, the message that comes through even stronger is: pull yourself together, man. Go back to college and get yourself out of the plant; adopt a child. Society oppresses, yes, but self-pity oppresses more...
...easy action. It will take all our energy, all our compassion, all our strength. We will need determination and faith, for truly it is our mission on earth, Without those, we are lost, but with them the big payoff and final reward will dwarf the millions that the selfish have hoarded and heal the divisiveness and the wounds already seared. It is our duty together, and together we must begin. For as my father quoted Albert Camus...
...knowledge but avoids prescribing values for patients. Erikson now says that this is an illusion: analysts intervene in the process by which patients create their values. Sometimes this is done by adjusting an individual to society's expectations, sometimes by seeming to encourage destructively "unrepressed" behavior (like a selfish sexual life that uses other people as objects). Erikson is unclear as to whether analysts can ever stop prescribing values, however unconsciously. But he insists they must try to do so, particularly since he expects rising pressures to turn them into gurus...