Quote:
Originally Posted by HomelessLoser
Please do yourself a favor and read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.
He was an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist who survived the death camps -- and like a hero of old, he's literally been to hell and back...with treasure.
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I read that book about 25 years ago. Funny, the person that gave me the book told me that Frankl's survival technique reminded him of my own :-). One sees a meaning in an idea or set of ideas. One survives by keeping an eye on what is meaningful to him in life, or to rephrase it in existential terms, finds meaningful elements in a badness that he is forced to endure by life's circumstances. Isn't that obvious and how does that relate to a need for psychoanalysis?
HL, on a different subject, you say that I am disregarding the historic fact that welfare was created to take care of unsupported children. But you are disregarding the contemporary fact that the last generation IUDs are almost pregnancy-proof (when combined with condoms, probability of pregnancy approaches probability of immaculate conception) and it is not mandatory to create unsupported children.
Haven't finished editing yet :-). You might be onto something with stopping to glamorize wealth. I am from a place which was a kingdom before 1940, and the young king (the son of the assasinated one) was deposed first by the Nazis, then the communists. He married someone from similar background, and they lived happily ever after in a 2-bedroom apartment on French Riviera. Well, if the king ended in a 2-bedroom apartment, you can imagine how a variety of other prominent citizens of my former country ended up between 1940 and 1970. Maybe because of these elements factoring into poverty, in my country of origin poverty was never linked with lack of education or life of crime (and 15 year old welfare mothers were an unknown entity). For some reason, because Parkchester in the Bronx is so architecturally significant, I always thought I would find civilized poor people there, similar to those I have seen as a child. But I don't know if one can find a concentration of those anywhere in the US. Maybe that would change if you would deglamorize wealth. But I don't see any natural conditions that would deglamorize wealth in the US.
And if you would deglamorize wealth, maybe you would also have easier time demystifying the ordinary financial resources (including to yourself) without lumping them with Warren Buffett's, as earning and maintaining a reasonable material basis for survival isn't generally a result of Warren-Buffet-sized luck (he did have luck, agreed, but he IS an outlier), but of personal efforts (I have been fairly unlucky in life, and being therefore suspicious of luck, have made practically no market investments in the course of life. Yet I earned and saved enough that I probably would not need social security or Medicare at all, unless I live past age 105-110). If you deglamorize wealth, you also begin to understand that not every financially stable person is Warren Buffet, in fact almost nobody is Warren Buffett, that financial stability is a result of some very normal and widespread efforts, and since most ordinary people attained their modest financial stability by those efforts (rather than luck), they should not ethically be asked to provide for people who didn't bother with the efforts. You know, the Aesop's tale of cricket & ant. Ok, I think I finished editing.
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