It is not necessary to put on a radio on the beach in order to drown the noise of the surf (which makes us all unequal) by the equalizing sound from the set. It is not necessary to watch a solar eclipse, made equal to all, on the television instead of observing it unequally through a smoked glass. It is not necessary to end the journey where the car stops. Or to finish the instruction where the manual ends. . . .

Thus plurality can still prevail where equality is no longer necessary. Equality is a matter of necessity. Inequality a matter of freedom. Whereas the process called man's plural existence began with the slogan freedom, equality, it reaches its conclusion in the acceptance of free men are not equal for:

we are not equal.

J. H. Van den Berg, Divided Existence and Complex Society

Without thinking about it [the adult] assumes that his child lives in the same house as he does, not realizing that while every nook and cranny is familiar to him, to the child it is foreign territory, even if the child has his own room to play in, and his own swing, and even his own cupboard. When he takes his child for a walk along the streets of the town, he assumes that the child is treading the same streets, seeing the same houses, and observing the same traffic. The distance which divides maturity from childhood makes it hard to remember how he himself experienced his home and the things around it when he was a child.

J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man

How did people live in the old days, how did they eat, how did they drink, how did they sleep? . . . We have no idea how our parents lived. When they tell us about it, when they take us with them into the past, we are amazed; we hear of a world in which everything was different. . . . What our grandparents tell us is even stranger, at least if we try to understand what their story contains. "There were no cars"; that is all right; but let us not have the idea that we understand what this simple information, this fact, implies. A city without cars is radically foreign to us, as foreign as a wagon rumbling on the main street with the driver asleep in the back . . . . the past cannot come to us because there are no points of contact, no similarities. Discontinuity permits no communication.

J. H. van Den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man

Time as duration is the identity of things, the consistency of their color and dimension. To this we must add . . . that the duration of things tempts us to assume that they do not change but remain the same. The world then becomes dry and nameless; ultimately even nothing but a formula. The tempo of things can induce us to believe in a "lawless," arbitrary, even enchanted world. Both these extremes must be rejected. Things not only have duration but also tempo.

In the period 1740-1900 duration was overestimated. That wouldn't have been possible if things hadn't presented themselves as having much duration and little tempo. Things with more duration than tempo impress us as dead or dying. It is no coincidence that in the period 1740-1900 the idea arose that through the irreversible process of cooling, the world as a whole faces death by cooling, or, in official terms, heat death. Between 1740 and 1900 things were already more or less dead. At any rate, they lost their luster, which is seen in the fact that the era was characterized by its inclination to strip things of anything that would inspire wonder. One who denies the wondrous aspect of things—that is, their changeability—loses respect for them. Once this respect has suffered, one can handle things casually. One handles them in this way when one passes over them quickly. He who moves with speed through a landscape proves that he has little respect for the things in it. Thus, the increasing velocity of locomotion in the period 1740-1900 can be seen as the expression of the overestimation for the duration of things that prevailed at that time.

J.H. van den Berg, Things: Four Metabletic Reflections