Ambition

It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the linchpin of society, holding many of its disparate elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart.Ambition, as opposed to fantasizing about desires, implies work and discipline to achieve goals, personal and social, of a kind society cannot survive without. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children.Yet to have a family nowadays-- with birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having children is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Finally, though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times, increasingly become the domain of the middle classes. Ambition and futurity a sense of building for tomorrow-- ar’e inextricable. Working, saving, planning--these, the daily aspects of ambition .... have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for. Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society’s work in America; and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition.

It is not difficult to imagine a world shorn of ambition. It would probably be a kinder world: without demands, without abrasions, without disappointments. People would have time for reflection. Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity. Competition would never enter in. Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end. Art would no longer be troubling, but purely celebratory in its functions.The family would become superfluous as a social unit, with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away.Longevity would be increased, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by tumultuous endeavor. Anxiety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.

Ah, how unrelievedly boring life would be!

雄心

若把雄心的许多不相关的因素结合起来，说雄心是社会发展妁关键似乎有些夸张，但也不算太夸张。没有雄心一个社会的基本组成要素似乎就分崩离析了。因为反对对欲望的不切实际的幻想，雄心意味着通过工作和磨练来达到一个社会生存所必不可少的个人和社会的目标。雄心与家庭的关系也很紧密，因为男人和女人不仅在一定程度上是为了家庭而奋斗；丈夫和妻子通常都对对方抱有高的期望，但是他们把最强烈的雄心抱负寄托在他们的孩子身上。在当今这个时代，要组织一个家庭本身就几乎是一种雄心勃勃的表示——因为现在已经有办法控制生育，而且物价飞涨也是不要孩子的经济方面的好理由。最后，虽然雄心勃勃曾主要是君王和贵族的领域，现今却越来越成为中产阶级的领地。雄心和展望未来——一种创造未来的感觉——是不可遏制的。工作，储蓄，计划——这些日常生活方面的雄心——一直是正在崛起的中产阶级的识别性标志。对雄心的批判并不是偶然地对中产阶级及其代表的一切的攻击。不管你喜不喜欢，在美国，中产阶级承担了社会的大部分工作，而正是中产阶级从一开始就是以雄心为动力的。

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