I’m still working on the #4 post about gospel frameworks. It’s getting pretty long, so in the meantime I’ll put this up for your reading and reflection.
In Jade’s recent post, she commented on a passage from The Fountainhead:
“Men hate passion, any great passion.”
This wouldn’t bug me so much but it seems to be a continuing theme, maybe? And I disagree. Or maybe I just need a good real life example of this, but it seems to me that for the most part people with great passion are admired.
I think I’ve got a “good real life example” for her.
I was recently riding in my friend’s car on a drive into town. There was a pickup truck right behind him in the adjacent lane. After we turned a corner, the truck suddenly accelerated quickly and zoomed ahead. It probably made it 100 yards before it had to slow down again because of the next car in front of it.
My friend said something like, “It brings joy in happiness into my heart to see a person speed ahead recklessly, only to be stopped by the car in front of it. I only wish a police officer had been there too catch him while he was going fast.”
I think that’s a feeling we can all identify with — watching the smartest kid in the class do poorly on a test, or seeing the motorcyclist who’s speeding between the lanes get cut off. There’s something petty in us that hates to see someone else have a good time without consequences, something justifies our own shortcomings by saying, “If he fails, then I don’t have to succeed.” To paraphrase Carol Lynn Pearson, we get in the erroneous mindset that God “grade[s] on a curve.” I think that is part of what Rand means when she says, “Men hate passion.”
Schadenfreude anyone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
Good call, Jon. I specifically appreciated the article’s link to “mudita”, which is a word I had never heard. I wanna get me some of that mudita-y goodness…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudita
I’d like to give the impression that I won’t only be posting here when I disagree with you Dane. That said, I disagree with your assessment whole-heartedly, because I think the premise is flawed.
A speeding motorcyclist who is dangerously weaving in and out of traffic that ends up stopped a few feet ahead of you at a traffic light was doing a ‘bad thing’, and karma bit back. The intelligent student who fails a test is just some poor kid upon which unrealistic expectations have been set based on past performance. I am genuinely interested in your interpretation of this line from The Fountainhead, but you lost me with that comparison.
In addition, I don’t see how either speeding or intelligence in any way relates to passion…and I still disagree with the quote in general.
I certainly prefer to be disagreed with…makes for better conversation.
I agree with your argument on two points — first, that the quote in general is wrong, and second, that my examples weren’t great.
Regarding the first, I don’t think that most of humanity is as mindlessly reflexive against passion as Rand makes them out to be. Rather, I would say that people, for the most part (myself included), are oblivious to 99% of what’s going on in the world. Regarding the second, I think that Rand’s observation is about something more malicious than the petty schadenfreude that my examples display.
That said, I believe my examples are still valid in regards to schadenfreude. The feelings I get on seeing the motorcyclist stopped at the red light aren’t so reflective as to encompass ideals like justice and the safety of the people around me. It’s more a selfish knee-jerk reaction that says, “Ha! He was going to get away with something that I didn’t, and boy it would have bugged me if he did, because…well, just because I didn’t!” Because if he had, I would have felt some sense of personal failure, that I hadn’t had the guts or the foresight to swoop through traffic and get through the red light too. His failure somehow vindicates my not-trying-at-all.
Everybody loves to see the underdog win.