10 February 2007

More from More

I finished reading Saint Thomas More's Utopia this morning and wanted to leave this for you:

...the Utopians fail to understand why anyone should be so fascinated by the dull gleam of a tiny bit of stone, when he has all the stars in the sky to look at - or how anyone can be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer wollen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.
Nor can they understand why a totally useless substance like gold should now, all over the world, be considered far more important than human beings, who give it such value as it has, purely for their own convenience. The result is that a man with about as much mental agility as a lump of lead or a block of wood, a man whose utter stupidity is paralleled only by his immorality, can have lots of good, intelligent people at his beck and call, just because he happens to possess a large pile of gold coins. And if by some freak of fortune or trick of the law - two equally effective methods of turning things upside down - the said coins were suddenly transferred to the most worthless member of his domestic staff, you'd soon see the present owner trotting after his money, like an extra piece of currency, and becoming his own servant's servant. Btu what puzzles and disgusts the Utopians even more is the idiotic way some people have of practically worshipping a rich man, not because they owe him money or are otherwise in his power, but simply because he's rich - although they know perfectly well that he's far too mean to let a single penny come their way, so long as he's alive to stop it...

Just a little something to ponder.

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