Society & Politics
6 d

What do you think of this text?

Today's mature men, still steeped in the principles of the nineteenth century, are in the habit of lamenting the near-total ruin of the spirit of thrift among the younger generations. Nobody puts anything "aside" any more: the modern worker, the clerk, even the young couple spends the whole of its earnings every week or every month. Worse still, they mortgage the future, squandering through credit purchases what they do not yet possess. (Our age knows this corrupting paradox: very generous credit for the superfluous, as in the "easy terms" offered to buyers of a car or a radio set, while credit for necessities, food and clothing, has almost entirely vanished.) This encroachment on the future is the devouring counterpart of the old spirit of thrift; it is foresight turned inside out. The man who once set something aside for tomorrow could say: "The future will be filled with what I store up today." The modern spendthrift can say: "The future will be emptied of what I devour today." The first feeds the future; the second preys on it like a vampire.

But this squandering of money, which scandalized the classic bourgeois, is only the most material, most superficial symptom of a flaw that runs to the very core of the modern soul: in every domain, man is becoming increasingly incapable of restraint. We no longer know how to wait; we want to be paid at once for everything we do, and we rush straight to the end of every possible pleasure. Authors no longer even take the time to write decently, in their haste to publish; lovers possess each other physically almost before they know each other, and so on. This haste is a sign of a profound exhaustion of character: the inner strength and balance of a man are measured by the length of the gap he can endure between his work or his love and their reward. In the limit case, a man agrees never to be paid at all...
What do you think of this text?
Updates
6 d
Of course, the disappearance of that narrow, sordid urge to accumulate money, which was the sin of the last century, hardly deserves to be mourned. But is it upward or downward that our spendthrift youth surpasses its hoarding fathers? To save, to lay in reserves, is a central demand of human nature, and it is to limit and arbitrarily distort the debate to understand these words solely as the piling up of material goods.
Updates
6 d
A medieval lord, a saint, an artist, a simple peasant bound to his ancestral soil and burdened with a family certainly did not amass money. But they amassed something else: a capital of virtues, traditions and good morals, not to mention reserves that were material yet vital, such as land, houses and their furnishings. These people knew how to resist the pull of immediate gratification;
What do you think of this text?
Post Opinion