Somehow, the ideal of being a good and useful person has been replaced by the ideal of being a winner. Money, now: that’s how we’re supposed to keep score.

Book publishers, newspapers, talking heads on TV, even “educators”– seem to think that they are doing the public a service by advising everyone to model their lives on the idiots whose lives are about making money. Virtue? Kindness? Friendship? Talent? Character? Fine, so long as they don’t get in the way of profits or share prices.

Nobody even mentions what the idiot’s company actually makes. No talk of the quality of craftsmanship or the satisfaction of helping people: all that counts is growth, & success. Growth and success of What? At what cost? To the planet, to the people who live on it? These CEOs and market manipulators are guys who have been wrecking the environment, busting unions, using the slogans of “free trade” and “feminism” to force workers around the world to compete in a race to the bottom.

Face it: a knack for making money is one part narrow-minded craftiness and nine parts luck. The capitalist dream is, for most people, a nightmare. Yet the stories of these narrow money-grubbing lives are told as if they should be hailed as heroes– and they are! They are! Not just by the lickspittles who are hired to admire them, but by the ambitious young– whose lives will be sucked dry by them. What fools we mortals be!