It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the linchpin of society,
holding many of its disparate elements together, but it is not an exaggeration
by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly
apart.Ambition, as opposed to fantasizing about desires, implies work and
discipline to achieve goals, personal and social, of a kind society cannot
survive without. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women
not only work partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious
for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their
children.Yet to have a family nowadays-- with birth control readily available,
and inflation a good economic argument against having children is nearly an
expression of ambition in itself. Finally, though ambition was once the domain
chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times, increasingly
become the domain of the middle classes. Ambition and futurity a sense of
building for tomorrow
