Where did you get that the other people deserve to die from?
They don’t want it badly enough, in the context of a prescriptive passage, ergo they deserve not to have it. Which is to say, they deserve to die.
You make a good counterargument to “make sure the brick walls stay up, because they keep out the other people,” but he didn’t say that.
As a motivational piece it doesn’t work unless you view a chance to prove yourself and stopping people who don’t want something badly enough from having it as desirable traits. The expected response isn’t to make you feel worse about brick walls, and he probably didn’t say it for no reason.
They don’t want it badly enough, in the context of a prescriptive passage, ergo they deserve not to have it.
No, they don’t want it badly enough, so they won’t get it. Not that they don’t deserve to get it.
As a motivational piece it doesn’t work unless you view [...] stopping people who don’t want something badly enough from having it as desirable traits.
No, they don’t want it badly enough, so they won’t get it. Not that they don’t deserve to get it.
I find this line of reasoning unconvincing since I take the passage as a whole to be intended to make people okay with brick walls.
Why do you believe this?
1)
I heard the whole speech last year sometime and concluded it was largely prescriptive at the time.
Ah here we go:
But remember: The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.
I suppose you might view it as an attempt to make people rail against the injustice of everything. However I believe that learned helplessness is a huge thing in our society and that strategy doesn’t plausibly fit into how I imagine most people as being likely to behave if you tell them something’s terribly unjust.
Ah, I’d forgotten that part. And now that you remind me of it, I remember that I intentionally started the quote after that line because I didn’t like it, for reasons similar to the ones you brought up. I now concede that he did seem to imply that keeping unmotivated people away from what they want is desirable (although I expect he would object if someone put it that way explicitly). He still mostly focused on getting around brick walls rather than leaving brick walls up, though.
Where did you get that the other people deserve to die from?
You make a good counterargument to “make sure the brick walls stay up, because they keep out the other people,” but he didn’t say that.
They don’t want it badly enough, in the context of a prescriptive passage, ergo they deserve not to have it. Which is to say, they deserve to die.
As a motivational piece it doesn’t work unless you view a chance to prove yourself and stopping people who don’t want something badly enough from having it as desirable traits. The expected response isn’t to make you feel worse about brick walls, and he probably didn’t say it for no reason.
No, they don’t want it badly enough, so they won’t get it. Not that they don’t deserve to get it.
Why do you believe this?
I find this line of reasoning unconvincing since I take the passage as a whole to be intended to make people okay with brick walls.
1)
I heard the whole speech last year sometime and concluded it was largely prescriptive at the time.
Ah here we go:
http://youtu.be/ji5_MqicxSo?t=17m47s
2)
I suppose you might view it as an attempt to make people rail against the injustice of everything. However I believe that learned helplessness is a huge thing in our society and that strategy doesn’t plausibly fit into how I imagine most people as being likely to behave if you tell them something’s terribly unjust.
Ah, I’d forgotten that part. And now that you remind me of it, I remember that I intentionally started the quote after that line because I didn’t like it, for reasons similar to the ones you brought up. I now concede that he did seem to imply that keeping unmotivated people away from what they want is desirable (although I expect he would object if someone put it that way explicitly). He still mostly focused on getting around brick walls rather than leaving brick walls up, though.