A Quote by Simone de Beauvoir
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
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Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.
Through social media, young people are constantly being pinged about a whole slew of potentially better matches or social activities.
Whereas if you're a reader, you can enter other people's minds, you can be in direct contact with people who may have lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. You can know what's like to be old if you're young or young if you're old. You can know what it's like to live in a completely different culture and really enter somebody else's mind. There's no amount of historical information that can give you access to the consciousness of a person from another culture or from the past in the way that reading really good novel from that place or time can.
As far as the anxiety, I have no idea about it. I don't feel like I have any nervousness out there. I'm just a guy who really cares about being competitive and that's the bottom line.
As I write, I control my anxiety and anguish thanks to the invaluable aid of irony and humor. But every night I am subdued by an anxiety that knows no irony, and I must wait until the next day to rediscover the blend of anguish and humor that characterizes my writing and that generates my style.
The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality.
The physical life of an individual person is limited, but the life of the masses united as an independent social-political organism is immortal. Only when an individual becomes a member of this community can he acquire the immortal social-political life.
How young people are represented betrays a great deal about what is increasingly new about the economic, social, cultural and political constitution of American society and its growing disinvestment in young people, the social state and democracy itself.
One thing that I'd just remind young people of is that when John Lewis, who's a member of Congress today, defied George Wallace and led the march from Selma to Montgomery, he was 23 years old. Martin Luther King was the old man in the bunch, and he was 35, so young people need to know that they've always been an important part of our society, have always been at the forefront of pushing for a more just America, and we can't be successful without the impatience, the vigor that young people bring to the fight for social justice.
I'm not interested in the wellbeing of society because society is a big lie. Where is society? I only see individual beings and only the individual can grow. Each one is enormous and tremendous in his own way-each one is unique.
When I put about my anxiety on social media, I decided I'm just going to be honest about it. I'm really glad I did it because I do think social media has taken over everyone's lives right now, especially the young ones. Kids are rocking around with Instagram at 5.
Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.
The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end.
The sexual freedom of today for most people is really only a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, a necessary feature of the consumer's way of life.
The need to speak the truth and even to seek it for oneself is only conceivable in so far as the individual thinks and acts as one of a society, and not of any society (for it is just the constraining relations between superior and inferior that often drive the latter to prevarication) but of a society founded on reciprocity and mutual respect, and therefore on cooperation.
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