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Comment by chattoraj | Hacker News Reader

I read it recently, and found it to be Atlas Shrugged for 5-year-olds. The only point of the story is to say: "YOU, the reader, being a child, are so much better and smarter than all these grown-up sheeple!!"

All told, I like the version at the end of this page[1] much better.

[1] http://the-toast.net/2013/08/02/texts-from-peter-pan-et-al/

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The book is largely aimed at adults, I believe. The message is "you, the reader (and I, the author): remember that you were once a child. Remember what you've forgotten. Don't be like those I have criticized here. Live".

Are you speaking of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"?

You're going to miss out on a lot of good things in life if you persist with this hyper-cynical attitude. How you managed to arrive at such a twisted misinterpretation is baffling, but it's a comment on you, not the book.

>The only point of the story is to say: "YOU, the reader, being a child, are so much better and smarter than all these grown-up sheeple!!"

I'm 24 and it's still true. Being an adult is being able to handle responsibilities and take care of yourself in the world. Being a grown-up is being a prig whose soul died years ago.

> Being an adult is being able to handle responsibilities and take care of yourself in the world. Being a grown-up is being a prig whose soul died years ago.

A fair opinion, but I don't think the book makes that distinction.

The prince keeps heckling the narrator even when he's trying to fix his plane and head back to civilization. How is trying to escape near-certain death a "grown-up" thing, as opposed to being an "adult" thing?

"Now you must work. You must return to your engine. I will be waiting for you here. Come back tomorrow evening . . ."

(...)

"I am glad that you have found what was the matter with your engine," he said. "Now you can go back home--"

Thanks for pointing these out. Looks like I need to reread the book.

Could you please elaborate on how the quoted passages establish the distinction between grown-up and adult ? It might be the language barrier but I am not getting the point.

I think sometimes it is hard to understand people who are just in a different place to us. We have values, and those change over time, and they reflect the values of society, which change over time. Is someone living true to their values so bad?

>Is someone living true to their values so bad?

Are those values tolerable to me? To go straight to the absurd end, Adolf Hitler lived a life entirely in accordance with his values. Yet, hand me a time machine and I'll kill him myself.

Of course, if we want to talk about how to reconcile different people to each other when they have radically conflicting values, we've hit what might be called the Hard Problem of Meta-Ethics.

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