(starting Fall Semester 2014)
One. Discuss the Pathology of Extremes
We veer into extremes, living in Apollonian or Dionysian time. We tend to oscillate to both extremes as one extreme feeds the other. We see this Kirn’s case.
Two. Class anxiety is part of Kirn’s ambition.
He sees his life as a performance, one being judged by others and he is desperate for others’ approval.
Three. His father seeks a bucolic existence as a counterpart to his corporate job, so the family lives in a 19th Century subsistence lifestyle.
This peasant life gives Walter shame and makes him suspicious of his father’s motives, for his father is a man who struggles with addiction and identity.
Four. Ambition is a life of quiet and insidious desperation.
Our hunger for a better life is part of our intelligence and our desperation. See page 4.
Five. “Percentile is destiny in America.”
See page 5. We compartmentalize skills and place a higher value on one, narrow definition of intelligence over other forms and we call this evidence of a person being “better” and “more qualified.”
See page 6 in which he discusses the college students, including himself, being book smart, but not street or life smart. Many of them go crazy, becoming fanatics and generally becoming broken down as human beings.
Six. Discuss ambition as a Faustian Bargain.
A Faustian Bargain, or Deal with the Devil, is when we trade our soul for something that we value more than our soul. Or put it this way. We think we’re getting something greater than we’re giving up, but in reality the opposite is happening. We’re losing more than we’re receiving.
Walter suffers from “gradual neurological withdrawal” as he consumes drugs and alcohol and runs away from his depression.
Seven. Discuss the chimera and its relationship with the Faustian Bargain.
Considering himself a man from the West, Walter sees the East Coast as the quintessence of “making it” and upper social class triumph, yet he always feels like an outsider even as he tries to prove himself worthy.
Eight. What is meritocracy as an idea and a reality?
As an idea, meritocracy means the cream rises to the top, but as a reality, Kirn is arguing that meritocracy is a code word for blind ambition: waking up every day and kissing the giant green butt of ambition.
Nine. What is sycophantism?
See page 12. The act of “befriending” the “right people” is the act of sycophantism. A person who does this is called a sycophant.
Ten. What is the personal “dislocation” described on page 12.
Angst (nervousness and restlessness)
Shame (of wasting life on nonsense and fool’s errands)
Alienation, disconnection from self and others
Self-ignorance
Ennui, spiritual numbing
Existential vacuum
Spiritual anorexia and depletion
Need to medicate oneself with speed, hash, pot, alcohol, etc.
Eleven. Ambition impedes us from getting a real education. Explain.
On page 14, we read that a real education is about articulating the demons and emotional baggage of our childhood, for those are the experiences that truly define us on a deep, molecular, cellular level. But ambition is about running away from that baggage.
Ambition isn’t about self-knowledge; it’s about gaining approval from others.
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