Recent reading

Fidel Castro: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview) by Playboy, Fidel Castro

As regards the charge of cruelty, I think the crudest people on earth are the ones who are indifferent to social injustice, discrimination, inequality, the exploitation of others—people who don’t react when they see a child with no shoes, a beggar in the streets or millions of hungry people. I really think that people who have spent all their lives struggling against injustice and oppression, serving others, fighting for others and practicing and preaching solidarity cannot possibly be cruel. I’d say that what is really cruel is a society—a capitalist one, for instance—that not only is cruel in itself but forces man to be cruel. Socialism is just the opposite. By definition, it expresses confidence and faith in man, in solidarity among men and in the brotherhood of man—not selfishness, ambition, competition or struggle. I believe that cruelty is born of selfishness, ambition, inequality, injustice, competition and struggle among men.

 Betty Friedan: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview) by Playboy, Betty Friedan

Do you see fascism coming? Friedan: Remember history. What preceded fascism in Nazi Germany? Economic chaos and the loss of a sense of national power. That caused people to scapegoat one another. Eventually, citizenship was taken away from the Jews. Then feminist organizations were outlawed and the rights of women—not only to abortion but also the right to work in professions or to hold political office—were taken away. Women were reduced to children, kitchen, church. Freedom of speech in Germany was suppressed altogether. Racism was taught in the schools in the name of science. And then there was war and the Holocaust.

 Stanley Kubrick: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview) by Stanley Kubrick, Playboy

If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living? Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism—and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in faith and in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong—and lucky—he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation.