A Quote by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.
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The individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance.
Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation.
A boy, by the age of 3 years, senses that his destiny is to be a man, so he watches his father particularly-his interests, manner, speech, pleasures, his attitude toward work.
No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.
The little individualist, recognizing his individual impotence, realizing that he did not possess within himself even the basis of a moral judgement against his big brother, began to change his point of view. He no longer hoped to right all things by his individual efforts. He turned to the law, to the government, to the state.
People are rapidly losing hope and trust. They believe their government has been captured by special interests and no longer cares about them, and they are right.
The notion that the UN is some sort of dispassionate body that, “does right” and just pursues everybody’s best interests is a fantasy. Each individual nation will be pursuing their best interests. That’s the normal behavior of nation-states. It shouldn’t surprise us, but neither should we go to them for permission to do what’s in our national interests.
Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.
I stand for all those who feel that the government no longer understands the individual and no longer respects individual rights.
Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole.
Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on.
Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.
Individual interests now trump any consideration of the good of society just as all problems are ultimately laid at the door of the solitary individual, whose fate is shaped by forces far beyond his or her capacity for personal responsibility.
Often there are players who have only football as a way of expressing themselves and never develop other interests. And when they no longer play football, they no longer do anything; they no longer exist, or rather they have the sensation of no longer existing.
The unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual.
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