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Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society

Book by Paul Goodman · 26 quotes · Men, Humans, Jobs

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Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society Quotes

“The importance of the Beats is twofold: first, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with. But second-and more important in the long run-they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of leisure in an economy of abundance.”

FirstsKindLongImportantUseRunningEconomyStudyMajorsBeatsImportanceAgreeOrganizedAbundancePilotsLeisureLong RunsCritique
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“Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.”

PeopleGivingMeanPoorQualityWorryStupidCommunicationHandleCensorshipDisturbedInventingBroadcastingPoor Quality
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“Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves. ... Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted.”

MenImportantHandsKidsYoungChoicesBoysStupidObjectsGeniusCapacityAverageInventionYoung ManDisappointedCynicalCharmingDominantConformApatheticDeviateDeviants
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“The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness.”

YearsHas BeensStillsRealSoulSelfHardMightWould BeAgeJobsBeliefMoralRiskHard WorkMetsIdealsYears AgoVicesErasYour SoulFiftyEnterpriseHeroicStillnessCapitalistRighteousThriftSelf RighteousGhastlyReal Jobs
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“To want a job that exercises a man's capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the "sole prerogative" to determine the products.”

MenWantJobsLeaderGenerationsProductsExerciseCapacityLaborManagementDetermineEnterpriseSoleDomainUtopianOur GenerationPrerogativeInvading
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“The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish "belonging," although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.”

GivingHumansKindRealBeliefGoalHuman BeingsImpossibleShareSpeechTasksAimContactBelongingBeing RealWarrants
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“A well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X, as Author X? He suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. But they can't buy that because the word doesn't exist in Time-style; he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist.”

MenShouldWellsAsksKnownCenturyStyleLettersFunctionMagazinesWell KnownPsychologist
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“An awkward consequence of heightening experience when one is inexperienced, of self-transcendence when one has not much world to lose, is that afterward one cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly experienced anything. If you aren't much in the world, how do you know you are "out of this world"?”

IfsKnowsWorldSelfLosesThis WorldConsequenceDo You KnowAwkwardTranscendence
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“In our truly remarkable an unexampled civil peace, where there are rarely fist fights; where no one is born, is gravely ill, or dies; where meat is eaten but no one sees an animal slaughtered; where scores of millions of cars, trains, elevators, and airplanes go their scheduled way and there is rarely a crash; where an immense production proceeds in orderly efficiency and the shelves are duly clears and nevertheless none of this come to joy or tragic grief or any other final good it is not surprising if there are explosions.”

IfsWayJoyDiesFightingBornAnimalGriefMillionsCarTrainFinalsIllProductionsMeatScoreRemarkableTragicSurprisingAirplaneImmenseCrashEfficiencyNeverthelessShelvesFistsExplosionsOrderlyElevators
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“It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.)”

BelieveHumansIdeasChoicesCommunityHuman BeingsLonelyCrisisAbsurdDissentEither Or
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“Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.”

MenMayChildrenBookMovingYoungFatherWatchesTelevisionFineMonthsTrainingHollywoodClubsCeaseInnocentYoung ManDullPublishingIrrelevantSelectionGood BookAvenuesExcludedMadisonMadison Avenue
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