The desire for power and superiority will of course take
different directions in each person, according to his make-up,
teaching and the other circumstances of his life. Property as a
means of pleasure, and as a symbol of achievement and of personal
worth, is valued highly from the earliest days of the child's
life. Very early does the child show that it prizes goods, shows
an acquisitive trend that becomes finally glorified into a goal,
an ambition. Money and goods become the symbol and actuality of
power, triumph, superiority, pleasure, safety, benevolence and a
dozen and one other things. Men who seek money and goods may
therefore be seeking very different things; one is merely
acquisitive, has the miser trend; another loves the game for the
game's sake, picks up houses, bonds, money, ships, as a fighter
picks up trophies, and they stand to him as symbols of his
superiority. Some see in property the fulcrum by which they can
apply the power that will shift the lives of other men and make
of themselves a sort of God or Fate in the destinies of others.
For others, and for all in part, there is in money the safety
against emergencies and further a something that purchases
pleasure, whether that pleasure be of body, or taste or spirit.
Wine and women, pictures and beautiful things, leisure for
research and contemplation,--money buys any and all of these, and
as the symbol of all kinds of value, as the symbol of all kinds
of power, it is sought assiduously by all kinds of men.
There are many who start on their careers with the feeling and
belief that money is a minor value, that to be useful and of
service is greater than to be rich. But this idealistic ambition
in only a few cases stands up against the strain of life. Unless
money comes, a man cannot marry, or if he marries, then his wife
must do without ease and leisure and pretty things, and he must
live in a second-rate way. Sooner or later the idealist feels
himself uneasily inferior, and though he may compensate by
achievement or by developing a strong trend towards
seclusiveness, more often he regrets bitterly his idealism and in
his heart envies the rich. For they, ignorant and arrogant, may
purchase his services, his brains and self-sacrifice and buy
these ingredients of himself with the air of one purchasing a
machine. So the idealist finds himself condemned to a meager
life, unless his idealism brings him wealth, and he drifts in
spirit away from the character of his youth. It is the strain of
life, the fear of old age and sickness, the silent pressure of
the deprivations of a man's beloved ones, the feeling of
helplessness in disaster and the silent envious feeling of
inferiority that makes inroads in the ranks of the idealists so
that at twenty there are ten idealists to the one found at forty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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