If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the idea of protesting against perceived moral excesses, suggesting that such protests imply complicity in the existing system.
Simone De Beauvoir argues that protesting against supposed moral abuses or excesses is misguided because it distracts from the underlying systemic issues that perpetuate these problems. Instead of focusing on individual acts of excess, we should recognize and challenge the pervasive systems that allow these behaviors to occur, indicating that change requires addressing the root of the problem rather than simply reacting to its symptoms.
Themes
ProtestMoralitySystemAbuseChangeComplicityPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about social justice, one might say, 'As Simone De Beauvoir points out, protesting against moral abuses without addressing the system is futile.'
More from Simone De Beauvoir
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Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.
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As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
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Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present β¦ Eating, sleeping, cleaning β the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
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