#172
decay immunity
...Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners visits, carriages, rank, and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honour and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it.
...And therefore the idea of the service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity of mankind, is more and more dying out in the world, and indeed this idea is sometimes treated with derision. For how can a man shake off his habits? What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
One of the more laughable facets of champagne socialism is the permeating belief that money cannot corrupt. That there is a way to bypass its inherent rot, that accumulation is not innately doomed to pervert the human soul. That one’s good intentions can circumvent greed.
That you can be a good millionaire, so long as you join the DSA.
It is a special kind of foolishness—a jejune understanding of life—to brazenly ignore history, to write off those who warned us, all in the name of having your cake and eating it too. It is a perversity, a spectacle of idiocy.
I mean, really, who the fuck do you think you are? How does one go about shedding this intrinsic susceptibility? How does one make oneself impervious to greed’s reach or to wealth’s promised decay?
