Charlton Heston's Ashes

Too bad about Charlton Heston's death. Dying's usually a hard thing and Heston has been deteriorating for a long time.

It just so happens that I watched the first Planet of the Apes on Saturday. Interestingly, it was the boundlesssness of human desire that led Heston to undertake his space flight as a way to seek something "better than man." It was that some boundlessness that Heston's ape antagonist viewed as being responsible for humankind's demise as a species.

But I don't think human desire is boundless. Outside of European societies of the last four or five hundred years, evidence of that kind of limitless desire is relatively scarce.

In today's "advanced" societies, it's more the case that social authorities actually "bind" us by stimulating our desires in consumerist directions.

In contemporary American the more we desire, the more constrained we are.