Word: successful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...economy gets tighter and standards get more meritocratic, Harvard becomes a more and more competitive and goal-oriented place, a place where success, or the appearance of success, can easily overshadow the means by which success is accomplished...
...recovery of the stolen Fogg coins wasn't a triumph of deductive reasoning. It was a lucky break, followed by some careful work. Most of all, it was not the smashing success the FBI wanted it to appear...
...Robin Starling, success meant becoming the perfectly adjusted boy. His fear of being abandoned was very tangible, not the intellectual crisis it is for the rest of us. His relative success was achieved by repressing the alienation he must have felt, forgetting about the contradiction in which he was caught--dependent on the very society which nearly killed him--and proceeding as if it didn't exist. He was, in a sense, fooling himself and, of course, fooling everyone else. But all of us--the readers, the newspaper which published his story, and myself, the person who wrote the story...
...only defense was that we were and we are victims of alienation, that feeling of emotional distance from a world in which we must constantly face something ugly in everything positive, something disappointing in everything successful. A typical reaction to alienating situations is to somehow redefine the situation as not contradictory. The simplest way to do that is to eliminate the upsetting scenes from one's life. We learn to look at life single-mindedly and edit out the bad footage in our vision and perceptions. We learn not to see certain contradictions. For instance, we learn...
...danger in acquiescing to the success-story model of the world and in being apathetic towards those who are expendable in this design is in not seeing the true nature of the world. And if we can be fooled about the world, we can be fooled about ourselves. If we can be talked into pursuing goals that have nothing to do with our ideals, them we can be talked into thinking that falling into the mold leaves us, like Robin, somehow less abandoned...