It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the drive of society,
holding many of its different elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much.
Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart.
Ambition is intimately connected with family,
for men and women not only work partly for their families;
husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other,
but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children.
Yet to have a family nowadays—with birth control readily available,
and inflation a good economic argument against having children—is nearly an expression of ambition in itself.
Finally,though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats,
it has, in more recent times,increasingly become the domain of the middle classes.
Ambition and futurity—a sense of building for tomorrow—are inextricable.
Working, saving, planning—these, the daily aspects of ambition
—have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class.
The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for.
Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society’s work in America;
and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition.
It is not difficult to imagine a world short of ambition.
It would probably be a kinder world:without demands, without abrasions,without disappointments.
People would have time for reflection.
Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity.
Competition would never enter in.
Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past.
The stress of creation would be at an end.
Art would no longer be troubling, but purely entertaining in its functions.
The family would become superfluous as a social unit,
with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away.
Life span would be expanded, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by overwork.
Anxiety would be extinct.
Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.
Ah, how unbearably boring life would be!