War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.
Chris HedgesRead
Most of these students are so conditioned to success that they become afraid to take risks. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging authority is never a career advancer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights how societal pressures can lead students to fear failure and avoid risks, conforming to authority instead of exploring their own paths.
Chris Hedges critiques the educational system and societal expectations that condition students to equate success with obedience to authority and adherence to traditional metrics like grades. This conditioning fosters a fear of failure and discourages risk-taking, ultimately stifling creativity and critical thinking. Hedges argues that this emphasis on pleasing authority figures to get ahead compromises the genuine pursuit of knowledge and personal growth.
Themes
SuccessFailureRiskEducationAuthorityCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used to inspire a workshop about embracing failures in the pursuit of creativity.
More from Chris Hedges
All quotes →As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of War our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence.
Chris HedgesRead
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
Chris HedgesRead
The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.
Chris HedgesRead
It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.
Chris HedgesRead
Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
Chris HedgesRead
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