Perspective

Kim du Toit, in a post dated yesterday, provides an entertaining but disturbing look at America and how we do business. Following the link to his defense of the three martini lunch is rewarding too.

I realise that our country's having been founded by religious extremists and the victims of same had an early impact on our course of development. I'm not convinced that accounts for the result Kim laments now, though. Human psychology is too complex and adaptive for that to be the case, I think.

Americans are acknowledged to be astonishingly productive in their labors; I wonder if we quite understand what else we are giving up in the course of being so provident. I think most adults realise that life is a series of compromises between what is desirable and what is available. I confess I do not understand why that seems to so anger us as a society.