The Desires Driving Human Behavior

   In his acceptance speech, Bertrand Russell goes into detail about the desires that power human behavior and to all of his points I firmly agree. He describes them as almost the backbone of our society by driving our economy forward with the acquisitiveness aspect of human nature and the rivalry aspect that forces man to compete for superiority. Among those two desires, acquisitiveness and rivalry, are two more desires that Russell discusses. These two are vanity and love of power. Man repeatedly demonstrates the power of these four desires not only in everyday life, but also in history as well.
   Acquisitiveness is the need for more, or never being content what one has. This desire is very prevalent in today's society with the new technology and other up and coming ideas to "make life better." For example, the newest iPhone will be released this September as Apple has said, but in my opinion what is wrong with the old iPhone. It is fully functional, has prime features and gadgets, but is still viewed as old, or outdated. People are never content with what they have and always seem to want more or the newer and better item. Russell gives the example of starved children who came to live with his family. These children had plenty to eat, yet still felt the need to steal potatoes from others and hoard their food. This may have been out of the fear that this food supply would run out just as theirs had, but I believe for the most part that this act was strictly out of greed. Acquisitiveness, not only is a backbone of our society, but also embodies human behavior and expands our economy.
    Two of the other desires that Russell states are love of power and vanity. These two desires coincide with one another, but differ in some aspects of their nature. The love of power is what drives man kind to tyranny for the most part. These leaders abuse their power just because they feel they can, but when it is time for that power to be taken away, these tyrants will do just about anything to protect it. I'm not talking about Hitler here, but yes he was a tyrant. I am talking about the tyrants of everyday life. The people in our lives who are just so power hungry they will do anything to feed that hunger. They want to feel as though they have superiority over everyone else. An example of this would be slavery in the South pre-Civil War. The slave owners were the tyrants of slaves, always abusing their power and dehumanizing their laborers. During this time not only were slave owners tyrants, but also whites in general were. They wanted to feel as though someone was beneath them. They wanted the ability to look down upon a population, even when some whites themselves lived in poverty with lower class jobs. The love of power was there and these whites would do anything to protect it; they would even succeed from the Union and cause a Civil War. Vanity goes with a love of power because it is the same kind of ideal. Vanity is seeking for the attention and approval of others. For example, a person rather than doing a good deed in quiet and receiving the self-satisfaction that he or she has helped someone else, would perform that same deed in the public, just so they would be formally recognized and praised for their actions. Vanity is all about how others perceive a person. Presidential candidates care deeply about this desire because their public image is a major factor of the election. This desire is most commonly found in our society today because our society today is so focused on how others perceive us, rather than how we think of ourselves. Vanity differs from love of war in this aspect: "vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power (Russell).Thus, vanity is the need for glory, while love for power is simply the need for power and superiority. These two desires coincide with one another, but differ in the aspect that you can have glory without power; however, these two desires are commonly found in everyday life, just not always detected. 
  The last desire that is discussed in Russell's speech is rivalry. This competition is our society in its entirety. There is a constant competition between man to be better than the other, but for what? There is no prize for being better than another person, just the satisfaction that he or she has now put down another person, but thats where the love of power comes into play. Russell discusses the desire of rivalry that is constant in our society today by stating that a person would gladly live in poverty if that meant reaping the benefits and leaving someone else's life in ruins, then goes on to state that is the background of taxes. Rivalry is constant in our society; its prevalent in our sciences with Darwin's "survival of the fittest" ideal and the whole concept of evolution, and it is also prevalent in our history and our athletics. This desire is constant and has come to a point in society were man just believes that everything is a competition and just does not want to be left in the dust. 
   So, in final do you agree or disagree with Russell's points that there really are only four desires of humans that impact their behavior?
  

What Would You Do?

In Tim O' Brien's collection of war stories, The Things They Carried, Tim writes in his narrative, "Ambush" about the time his daughter asked him if he killed a man. At the time he says "Of course not,"(O'Brien 125) just to keep his daughter's fairytale, that her dad is a hero, alive, but as time goes on he wishes that she would ask again. He states "Someday, I hope, she'll ask again. But here I want to tell her exactly what happened or what I remember happening"(125). He hopes to one day fix his lie and come clean to his daughter, but he wants to do this at a time where he feels she would be able to understand why these actions occurred. 

Tim O'Brien then goes on to tell the readers the story of how he killed the man, rather than his daughter. He states how his platoon was on preparing for ambush, when a man passed him on the trail, so out of fear he killed him. O'Brien had no intention of killing the man though, all he wanted him to do was just go away, but his fear got the best of him and he threw the grenade that exploded at the man's feet. O'Brien states his intentions when he says, "there were no thoughts about killing. That grenade was to make him go away--just evaporate"(126-7). O'Brien did not want to kill this man, but the kill or be killed mentality was in his head, so rather than let himself die, he protected himself. O'Brien later goes on to say "I wanted to warn him"(127). This just goes to show that O'Brien is no cold-blooded monster. He was going to warn the enemy about a grenade that he threw. This just shows to the readers that O'Brien was a good guy with good morals and just reenforces why he wanted to wait till his daughter was older to tell her this story. He wanted her to understand that he had no malicious intent, rather he just wanted to protect himself. 

So, if you were in O'Brien's shoes and your nine year old daughter knew you went to war and asked if you had ever killed anyone, what would you say? Would you respond like O'Brien did and hope for an opportunity to come clean, or would you just come right out and say yes?

Character Development: Mary Anne

  In Tim O'Brien's collection of war stories, The Things They Carried, he tells the story of "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" in this story the character Mary Anne is introduced. This story is told by Rat Kiley who has a "reputation for exaggeration and overstatement,"(O'Brien 85) so it is his own personal truth as to what actually happened with Mary Anne. Anyways, Mary Anne when she first arrive on the base she was this bubbly, "young"(93) girl who found herself entranced by war. Throughout the story, the change and development of Mary Anne from her young self to the Mary Anne who was just the shell of her former self, unrecognizable to her boyfriend, Mark Fossie.

When Mary Anne arrived to the base, she was described as this: "she had long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream"(89). All of these adjectives relate back to her naiveté because her "white legs" are blank like a canvas, not yet damaged or scarred by the grotesque nature of war. Her complexion is that of "strawberry ice cream" a childish description, thus relating back to her childish nature. She, like all of the soldiers, was a child still, a mere adolescent, yet she willingly went to a place filled with death.

Throughout the story, Mary Anne's personality and desires change. Rather than just for Mark Fossie, Mary Anne found her own purpose and reason for staying on the base. She started to learn the trade and rather than be afraid of the monstrosities of war, she liked the rush it gave her. As time goes on the Mary Anne everyone knew started to dissolve, but what remained was a war hungry woman. Once Mary Anne found her place with the Greenies, that was it, she was gone for good. Mark Fossie tried multiple times to pull the old Mary Anne out of her, but the war had already changed her. On Mark Fossie's last attempt to reach out to his old flame, the woman he saw was looked like the Mary Anne he once knew, but acted nothing like her. O'Brien writes, "At least for a moment she seemed to be the same pretty young girl who had arrived a few weeks earlier. She was barefoot. She wore her pink sweater and a white blouse and a simple cotton skirt"(105). So, this description at least goes along with the Mary Anne that Mark Fossie fell in love with, but when O'Brien continues he states, "her eyes: utterly flat and indifferent. There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it. But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl's throat was a necklace of human tongues"(105). The affect that war had on Mary Anne is definitely apparent through these quotes because from above the quote about her bubbly description to the description of her after being in a war zone for a number of weeks, the overall affect of the war and the development of her character is astounding. She turned into a war-obsessed monster from a young, naive girl. 

Who Carried the Most?

In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, each of the soldiers carries something, whether it be an item or a figurative weight on them. Upon reading these tremendous weights that these men carry on a daily basis for hours at a time, the question who carried the most popped into my head. So, who did carry the most?
In my opinion it was Lieutenant Cross. He not only carried the pounds of artillery, uniform, and rations like everyone else, but also he carried "the responsibility for the lives of his men"(O'brien). Since he was lieutenant, he was the one accountable for all the men and no one else had to carry around that weight besides him. Along with the responsibilty that he carried, he also carried the death of Ted Lavender with him. Lieutenant Cross blamed himself for the death of Lavender because he felt that if he was not so preoccupied with day-dreaming about Martha that he could have prevented losing one of him men. That guilt that Lieutenant carried was not just a figurative weight. That weight can change a person and break them down, but Lieutenant Cross decided that he was going to use that weight to change. He decided to become a more focused commander and to lead his men more strictly.  Finally, the last weight that all of the men felt was fear. This fear was not the regular I am scared kind of fear, but rather a fear for their lives. These men risked their lives for America's freedom and they did not know every day if they were going to make it out alive, so in actuality this weight was not something that could be taken lightly. Lieutenant Cross felt that fear everyday, but he also had the fear of letting down his men and his country, which is a big job. It was draining to constantly having to check their surroundings and to worry that they might not make it home. Although these three weights were not actual items that Lieutenant carried, he carried them mentally and had to deal with their repercussions as they took their toll on him. So, in total I firmly believe that Lieutenant Cross carried the most.

The Things They Carried Style

Tim O'Brien's style in The Things They Carried is very different from the style of any other writers I have ever read. Even within the first short story, the style can be detected. Tim O'Brien uses the literary device called cataloging. He uses this device by creating a list of all of the items that the men carried, figuratively and materialistically, aside from the plot of the story. When creating these lists, O'Brien details the items meticulously by even stating the weight of each item and profiles the people by stating what they carried. For example, on page 2 of the novel when describing what Ted Lavender carried he states, "Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers"(O'Brien 2). While describing what he carried he is also telling the readers what his character is like and why he carried those items. Throughout the short story, he later comes back to characters mentioned earlier. To go along with the Ted Lavender, O'Brien later comes back to this character and continues with what he carries. He states, "But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighted fear."(6). So, as you can see, O'Brien gives detail to these items by giving their weight and stating that the fear Lavender felt as he died was heavier than the pounds of ammunition and gear that he carried with him. His style is apparent with the use of cataloging and the development of characters and the things they carried throughout the short stories.