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discipline

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I work with a great deal of discipline, although I usually take on more than I can handle and often have to extend due dates. I have always been appalled by bohemianism because of its laziness, disorder, and moral weakness. I understand that this way of living is a response to the fact of human frailty, but it leans too far in one direction. Being a little more buttoned up doesn__ mean that you__l get so brittle that you__l break. Nor does it mean that you don__ understand tragedy, loss, and, most of all, human limitation.I am more than well aware of those things and I feel very strongly, but on the other hand I like to run ten miles and return to a spotless well-ordered room, and I like my shirts heavily starched. When I used to go on a long run on Sunday morning when I lived on the Upper West Side, I would pass thousands and thousands of people in restaurants eating . . . (I won__ say this word, because I hate it so much, but it rhymes with hunch, and it__ a disgusting meal that is supposed to be both breakfast and lunch). There they were__aving slept for five hours while I was doing calisthenics and running__nshaven (the women too), bleary eyed, surrounded by newspapers scattered as if in a hamster cage, smoking noxious French cigarettes, and drinking Bloody Marys while they ate huge quantities of fat. They looked to me like a movie version of South American bandits. I would never want to be like that. I prefer to live like a British soldier.

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But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This __bsurdity_ is simply the price of freedom__reedom is not free, as they put it in the film [300]. Freedom is not something given, it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. Spartan ruthless military discipline is not simply the opposite of Athenian __iberal democracy,_ it is its inherent condition, it lays the foundation for it: the free subject of Reason can only emerge through ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake and a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity, one makes a truly free choice when one__ choice puts at stake one__ very existence__ne does it because one simply __annot do otherwise._ When one__ country is under foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not __ou are free to choose,_ but: __an__ you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?

Slavoj Žižek

In Defense of Lost Causes