The noteworthy author Haruki Murakami recently gave a short speech when he received the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. Here's my favorite part:
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.
Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals.
I have only one purpose in writing novels, that is to draw out the unique divinity of the individual. To gratify uniqueness. To keep the system from tangling us. So – I write stories of life, love. Make people laugh and cry.
(hat tip to the very smart John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla)
This is nicely written but the more I contemplate it, the more counterexamples I think of that make me believe that it totally doesn’t work – a sane person can’t always root for the egg.
Murderers/rapists/abusers/people who violate the most important elements of the modern social contract — they are eggs that crack against the rules of our society… the fact that high hard wall of society will win and they will ultimately lose doesn’t make me root for them. I guess that’s just the part of me that likes being contrarian – they are nice words and I’m sure that my manipulation of them towards this rather morbid definition wasn’t Mr. Murakami’s aim