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And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,

But he’ll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day: then shall our names

Familiar in his mouth as household words

Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,

Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Chills, right? It reminds any reader that in order to triumph over a seemingly insurmountable trouble, you first need to find yourself in a seemingly insurmountable trouble. It is a phenomenally important insight. In Twelfth Night, also in the mouth of a character, is a speech widely considered Shakespeare’s carpe diem:

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O, stay and hear! your true-love’s coming,

What is love? ’Tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter;

What’s to come is still unsure:

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty!

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Of course, these poems are just about battles and kisses, and even the wise will tell you that when it comes to battles and kisses, sometimes the only choice is a screaming, brutish plunge. We do not see eloquent exhortations to earn money and power until modern consumerism and democracy started insisting that self-interest is what drives community success.

From Bernard Mandeville, with his famous “Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits” (1714), to Adam Smith’s vision of capitalism as cooperation through competition, to what Max Weber famously named the Protestant work ethic, modernity has suggested that individual self-interest often serves communal needs. Get rich and your whole town benefits. Take what’s yours and you are serving the community. The good grow rich. By the nineteenth century, ambition was lauded to a remarkable degree. Consider an excerpt from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—”:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Well, in truth, what you’ll be is an overly defended, tightly wound Victorian guy. Still, it is a fine motivational speech. Actually, come to think of it, “If—” is a motivational speech about war, too—and it encouraged the awful violence of the Boer War. What I want to point out is that all sorts of unnecessary pain is built into this motivational idea. First of all, what’s all this about “winnings”? As we begin the last two stanzas of this famous poem, we are given the world as a high-stakes gambling game. Then, having lost everything, you are encouraged to “never breathe a word about your loss.” Not good advice. Next, you are challenged to “force your heart and nerve and sinew” (force is a hard directive for such fleshly tissue). Look how “Will” (capitalized, alone along with “Man”!) is to be encouraged above all else, even to the point of wearing out its own heart. The next four lines all say that people are the same, that we should