People are unwilling to bow to fate. But if you can soak in an ocean of anesthesia, looking as though you’re still striving, still living — well, honestly, maybe that’s fine too. Not everyone can just give up, can they? Living by mistake is at least more right than rotting away in surrender — isn’t it? I don’t know. That, I really don’t dare to say.
If everyone in society saw things clearly, lived with full lucidity, then the economy could no longer keep turning. With everyone perfectly rational, the frequency of shopping would drop sharply — because, as it turns out, most things never needed to be replaced or upgraded through constant buying. A few sets of clothes are enough; you don’t head out to buy more every few days. Consumption, no doubt, would fall dramatically.
And if everyone were clear-headed enough to realize that success comes from luck, not effort (though effort is itself one part of luck), the number of people starting companies would plummet. Investment and financing would turn eerily quiet. And if everyone were full of wisdom, drawing a sense of inner superiority from restraint — from reading, from exercise — then spending on junk food, games, entertainment, gambling would all shrink drastically. Society would lose its engine of growth.
But who says the Earth has to develop? Who says society has to advance? It was people who decided that, no one else. Humans always have to meddle with nature. And never mind developing society — we’ve already aimed our schemes for growth at the Moon, at Mars. Yet say that a person should just live honestly for a lifetime, think about nothing, eat well and drink well and call it enough, and someone will leap up to accuse you of debasing humanity to the level of pigs and dogs. People are just that complicated. I can’t explain it either.
So the best outcome, I think, is this: 99% of people release human nature exactly as it is, and the remaining 1% gain wisdom through restraint. That’s simply how this world is — fools are the vast majority. But a fool is merely a fool; strip everything back to its essence, and all people are equal.
There is no such thing as right and wrong in this world. You drinking and clubbing every day is no different from me reading and working out every day. We’re all just one distinctive smear of paint on God’s palette. Splashed across the cloth, that becomes what we call the world.
When the cart reaches the mountain, the road appears — my ass. Failure is the mother of more failure. Within books lies a house of gold — bullshit (and you buy it, just because an emperor said so?).
Why do so many of these self-comforting lines spread so far and wide? Because people still don’t want to hear the truth. When the cart reaches the mountain and there’s no road, there’s no road — so what, are you going to ram one open? Failure only makes you fail more; it’s the attitude you take afterward, and the honest reckoning, that keep you from failing the next time. And if books really held houses of gold, we’d all just sit and read — besides, reading was never meant to be this mercenary.