Gabor Lenard 💗

We live in a culture where almost the whole economy depends upon the creation of artificial desires; upon giving you desires that you might never have had in the ordinary way, and therefore thinking that you want things that simply aren’t wantable. A lot of people—for example, when they feel miserable, depressed—simply go out shopping, because somehow purchasing something seems to be a fulfillment of life. I mean, I know of a lot of wives whose husbands are engaged in business and leave them alone most of the day, and there’s nothing to do—except they regularly go and go shopping. They shop every day as if it was something they had to do every day like having breakfast. And, of course, that keeps things buzzing and keeps the economy going. It means you misinterpret your own feelings. And so there’s always, after a shopping spree, a sense of letdown. Same thing happens every Christmas Day with children. You know, toys are increasingly phony: they are a method of propitiating children. I was saying yesterday about the educational system as being a method of preventing children from growing up too fast so that they won’t come on the labor market in one huge podge. So, in the same way, children who are not allowed to participate in human activities, such as cooking and hunting and so on, have to be given so many activities: toy cooking stoves, dolls, dolls houses, guns, anything but the real thing, so that they will be kept amused and kept out of the way. Because any real child, you know, likes to play with pots and pans and all the things that the adults use and are doing. But toys prevent them from doing that. Now then, what happens is: the children are given an immense artificial desire for toys. A toy shop seems paradise. But when, on Christmas Day, the beautiful tree and all the tinsel and all the stuff and packages, wonderfully wrapped—you know, the wrappings are better than the contents! More beautiful! They get all these things out and the room is strewn with guns and buses and dolls and all that stuff. By four o’clock in the afternoon they are screaming frantic. Because actually, the whole thing was a terrible letdown. And that happens again and again. But that happens to the adults, you see? The adults are merely repeating for the children what they’re doing. They’re acquiring all this kind of pretentious junk and thinking that’s the answer, and it’s a letdown. Because they didn’t find out that they don’t really want it, and they don’t find out what they do really want. Because everybody has to pretend that it’s good to work for what you don’t want. So that’s the initial difficulty. That is the mere guardian dog at the gate on this path, you see?

The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. Man doesn't learn this secret easily, but to shun pleasure altogether is cowardly avoidance of a difficult job. For we have to learn the art of enjoying things *because* they are impermanent.

We are all bewitched by words. We confuse them with the real world, and try to live in the real world as if it were the world of words. As a consequence, we are dismayed and dumbfounded when they do not fit.