2:23 PM
Over on Electrolite, Patrick quotes from a New Yorker profile of Vaclav Havel:

All too often, Havel wrote, living normally "begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society."

Patrick goes on to say:

Spot on. Because the desire to avoid extra effort is such a powerful part of human behavior, we tend to assume--when we're thinking loosely--that humans generally want to avoid work. But the desire to be effective and the desire for one's efforts to be meaningful are powerful as well. Those in power habitually underestimate how radicalizing it is when individuals find themselves frustrated in their sincere attempts to do good work.

In the grand tradition of blogging, commenting on comments, let me say: Yes.

Further, one could speculate, though I could neither confirm nor deny, that emergencies aside, one could graph the frequency of posts to some blogs as some sort of correlative indicator of stress on this. Very. Issue.