Wikipedia explanation: In other words: in order to be happy, a family must be successful on each and every one of a range of criteria e.g.: sexual attraction, money issues, parenting, religion, in-laws. Failure on only one of these counts leads to unhappiness. Thus there are more ways for a family to be unhappy than happy.
The Tolstoy's version is so much better (because it is more pithy) than the Aristotelian original. But here is the Aristotle's version translated into English.
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let it suffice to say that if the writer was my son, I would disown him and then beat myself up wondering how I failed so badly raising him. He comes across as nothing more than a sniveling, whiny bitch. No one I know engages in unnecessary manual labor or any other form of physical activity out of some pathetic sense that this is required to make them masculine. No one I know prefaces discussing a serious problem with a close male friend by acknowledging that others have much worse problems than whatever they are about to reveal. I have personally been robbed at gunpoint by three scrawny teenage crackheads with a sawed off shotgun. At no time have I ever wondered "what did I think I was going to do to these poor, drug-addled latchkey children anyway." If I had been able to disarm them I would have happily beat the shit out of all three of them without a second thought.
Yes the writer is a trainwreck, but I can't stop reading the long ass words of his. Precisely because it is a trainwreck
It is instructive for the fact he is a trainwreck. He is a trainwreck for he is trying to live to "impossible standards" and he is demonstrating and also explaining in a petty way how the standards is impossible. The author is miserable and I can't stop reading it for it is like watching a trainwreck on a tv screen, I am repulsed by what is happening and what I foresee as the outcome yet I can't turn my attention away from it. The same part of me that is repulsed by what I see is simultaneously drawn into the the spectacle of it all.
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Except while the author is a trainwreck in living his life, he does have some points. Living inauthentic images of what you think you should be, reaching for these impossible standards and defining your success by them is absurd. Yet we as a society continue to create these impossible standards and expect other people to live by them, and we get huff when people do not live up to them, blaming all of societal ills on the fact people do not live to these impossible standards.
(Supposedly) Society is broken for men do not act like men in the 1950s. Except men in the 1950s did not live like the idea / image we have of men in the 1950s. It is pure projection where we as children have expectations of what adulthood is supposed to be, these images exist still in our adult minds until we either become internally anxious for we do not live up to these standards, or we become externally anxious complaining about our fellow man. It is pure nonsense for if those images gradly change over time , if they were both challenged and reaffirmed over time and space they would be reshaped in a far more congruent manner. But life is not always like this, images can remain solid not updating in the past remaining inert due to nostalgia, until we are forced to reject the image and its nostalgia in its entirety instead of bending the images and adding new images over time and space.
Aka I am going to "make a man out of you" song, from Disney 90s movie Mulan?
The song is saying being a man is a performative act and all of the "males" in the army training do not even close to measuring up to the idea of men. Eventually the males in the training camp get better, yet it is the female in the training who actually lives the best to the impossible standards. Regardless it is the males in the camp that forged so much of their "self-image" around being men that they do not see that it was a female who did the man job the best, and they could not even seen her gender for it is obscured by the image of manhood.
The point of the song is that being a man is not about images, or it is words, or it is about the beats, but the simultaneous blending of multiple things into a synthesis, where a synchronicity is reached. A music video is a good encapsulation of this for one beat out of rhythm messes everything up, but it is so many things happening at once that you can't even see / hear how each individual instrument, image, scene change is adding to the greater whole until you see something that is wrong.
It is not one thing that is correct vs invalid, it is instead the blending of many things into one thing. The synchronicity of it all forming a union.
- 13/11/2018 04:28:16 AM
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- 13/11/2018 04:31:07 AM
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