The illness of common mention is that men feel the need to complete the many things that they perceive life to have left unfinished. If you are of ordinary mind you suffer the affliction of thinking that and it is yours, and every other right-thinking-person’s responsibility, to add the needed, finishing touches to life. However, no one seems able to conclusively do so.
This urge in man produces, “Progress.” It also results in confusion. Both are natural to man, but one is escapable by a few.
Amongst civilized humanity, acceptance of current conditions is seen as a certain sign of a man’s backward state. Complacency is continually condemned, as the mentally refined endlessly fret over the ever-lurking specter of the status quo.
Throughout the physical world it is indeed those the least educated, culturally sophisticated, and technically advanced who most display a laissez-faire attitude about their lives. An urbanite worries about the look of his lawn, while a jungle dwelling hunter accepts whatever be the natural conditions surrounding his hut. City sophisticates strive mightily to, “get ahead,” while rural bucolics are satisfied, sitting on a stump, with no place to go.
The intellectually oriented, the engine of progress, are ceaselessly concerned about, “world affairs and the future of humanity,” while the rest of the world finds it to be just so much,
“Ho hum.”
J.