work to optimize our future performance, while playing in the present.
Otherwise we lumber around, sloth-like, unconscious, unformed and careless.
Overprotected, we will fail when something dangerous, unexpected and full
of opportunity suddenly makes its appearance, as it inevitably will.
The skatestoppers are unattractive. The surround of the nearby sculpture
would have to have been badly damaged by diligent boardsliders before it
would look as mean as it does now, studded with metal like a pit bull’s collar.
The large plant boxes have metal guards placed at irregular intervals across
their tops, and this, in addition to the wear caused by the skateboarders,
produces a dismal impression of poor design, resentment and badly executed
afterthoughts. It gives the area, which was supposed to be beautified by the
sculpture and vegetation, a generic industrial/prison/mental institution/work-
camp look of the kind that appears when builders and public officials do not
like or trust the people they serve.
The sheer harsh ugliness of the solution makes a lie of the reasons for its
implementation.
Success and Resentment
If you read the depth psychologists—Freud and Jung, for example, as well as
their precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche—you learn that there is a dark side to
everything. Freud delved deeply into the latent, implicit content of dreams,
which were often aimed, in his opinion, at the expression of some improper
wish. Jung believed that every act of social propriety was accompanied by its
evil twin, its unconscious shadow. Nietzsche investigated the role played by
what he termed ressentiment in motivating what were ostensibly selfless
actions—and, often, exhibited all too publicly.^166
For that man be delivered from revenge—that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a
rainbow after long storms. The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. “What justice
means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge”—thus they
speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeange and abuse on all whose equals we are
not”—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name
for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!” You preachers of
equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most
secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.The incomparable English essayist George Orwell knew this sort of thing
well. In 1937, he wrote The Road to Wigan Pier, which was in part a scathing