The Ideal Of Having A Real Job

We Do Not Behave As If We Believed That The Affairs Of Our World Were Significant Enough For The Intervention Of Great Men.

We Define Boredom As The Pain A Person Feels When He's Doing Nothing Or Something Irrelevant, Instead Of Something He Wants To Do But Won't, Can't, Or Doesn't Dare. Boredom Is Acute When He Knows The Other Thing And Inhibits His Action, E.g., Out Of Politeness, Embarrassment, Fear Of Punishment Or Shame. Boredom Is Chronic If He Has Repressed The Thought Of It And No Longer Is Aware Of It. A Large Part Of Stupidity Is Just The Chronic Boredom, For A Person Can't Learn, Or Be Intelligent About, What He's Not Interested In, When His Repressed Thoughts Are Elsewhere.

American Society Has Tried So Hard And So Ably To Defend The Practice And Theory Of Production For Profit And Not Primarily For Use That Now It Has Succeeded In Making Its Jobs And Products Profitable And Useless.

In A Milieu Of Resignation, Where The Young Men Think Of Society As A Closed Room In Which There Are No Values But The Rejected Rat Race, ... It Is Extremely Hard To Aim At Objective Truth Or World Culture. One's Own Products Are Likely To Be Personal Or Parochial.

The Aim Is Not To Give Human Beings Real Goals That Warrant Belief, And Tasks To Share In, But To Re-establish "belonging," Although This Kind Of Speech And Thought Is Precisely Calculated To Avoid Contact And So Makes Belonging Impossible.