Blargh Blog

Tuesday, September 07, 2004

“... it has everything you want and more”, a dialogue in three characters

A– "...and more"? That’s not good. "Everything you want" is perfection, and then they’re adding in additional things that you won’t like. It’s as if they’re bragging about having things you don’t want, and a lot of people won’t even notice because our society has this crazy "more is better" thing going on.

B– Now, wait. You’re switching between "want" and "like" there. I think they’re saying that it has everything you want, plus some other things that you’ll like, though you don’t know that you’d like them & you may not even know that they exist.

A– I think those can still count as things you want. But even granting that "want" is not always used with this more expansive definition and that "everything you want" is ambiguous on this point, the way to indicate that you intend to include these wants that you don’t even know you have is not to add a wide-open "and more" that could include anything.

B– That’s a funny so-called "expansive" definition of "want". As if everything you could ever come to want, even things that haven’t been invented yet, are already just latent wants waiting hidden inside of you. I don’t think they want to promise to satisfy all of those so-called wants, though I suppose you could never prove them guilty of failing to satisfy a "want" that you don’t know you have.

C– It seems like using an expanded definition of want, or tacking the "and more" at the end and assuming it means well, sends this promise into a utopian direction. Though even with the restricted version of "want" it seems to be offering perhaps a bit more than it can back up, no? I mean, who’s to say that a person’s wants are all consistent with each other? It’s like those people who try to whet your attention by telling you "everything you’ve heard is true!" Well some of the stuff I’ve heard contradicts some of the other stuff. I doubt that these folks offering me everything even know what all I want, let alone how to get it all for me.

B– So even this restricted "everything you want" is awfully utopian. But it doesn’t seem all that great to me, as far as utopias go. It only satisfies those wants that you have right now, the ones you can think of, and I, for one, don’t want my utopia to be limited by my imagination.

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