You assume too much about personal desires (what other kinds are there)?
Is it something you cannot conceive that a person might desire more a lifetime love - than 1,000 experiences of "indescribable pleasure, indefinitely prolonged".
Or, to take a walk along the Appalachian Trail than make a corporate merger?
Or, my lying in a lush English meadow watching the clouds scud across a blue sky - rather than speeding along in a four wheel drive SUV?
As I said, desires are personal (no, employees cannot satisfy desires for you). You have desires, without doubt. What do you really desire?
How about four more children? Something that was pretty normal at one time and usually led to lifetime bonding and support when it's needed.
Before your hair stands on end - or perhaps falls out - think about it. Is it possible for an average individual to have a larger family under modern conditions? It's certainly anything but easy. If you don't want a large family, that's fine. But, if your desire included a family, most people n0wadays have to put it at the bottom of the list. Just nurturing one child seems to be a full-time experience with inevitable failure lurking ahead.
So, while we may have unlimited desires, we find many of them difficult or impossible. So we put them at the bottom of our hierarchy. (Maybe conditions will change.)
Perhaps a test of our well-being might be the attainable desires that open up before us.
Perhaps the test of our society is the greater or lesser restriction it places on the attainment of our personal desires.
So, when you next look at the first assumption of human behavior "that man's desires are unlimited" try not to think of people acquiring five Cadillacs, or buying 6 companies. Think instead of a person perhaps sitting alone in the middle of the night, trying desperately to complete his desire - a perfect love poem.
Harry
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Brad wrote:
Harry Pollard wrote: > > Brad, [snip] > Your Don Juan paragraph is ill-directed to someone who spent 57 years with > one woman.I apologize for your misreading what I wrote as a personal accusation instead of as a question about the implications of the depersonalized hypothesis that man's desires are unlimited. - If man's desires are unlimited then Don Juan seems to me to be a good example of our nature. But there are other ways to be infinitely insatiable. Business merger maniacs are another kind. One cannot satisfy all infinite desires concurrently. You gotta pick and choose, and having infinitely many women means one probably cannot have infinitely many corporate acquisitions, and either of these means you cannot have infinitely many hubcaps collected from the side of the road. One can only do one thing at a time (more or less...) -- unless one has: EMPLOYEES! Then one can vicariously pursue as many kinds of grabbing more and more, as one has vicarious hands to grab with.... So if man's desires are infinite, then the most infinite man is the one who has infinitely many employees to satisfy as many infinite desires as possible at once -- vicariously, however.... \brad mccormick
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
