I'd like to silence you (how I'd like to silence you) with a closing quotation from Thomas More's Utopia, from 1516. It's a complicated text: satirical, political, self-contradictory in places and morally complex.
But as this is a blog, I can ignore all that nuance stuff and just give you this, which I hope you agree applies to our current condition.
Hythlodaeus (who appears to represent one aspect of More's personality):
It appears to me that wherever you have private property and all men measure all things by cash values, there it is scarcely possible for a commonwealth to have justice or prosperity - unless you think justice exists where all the best things flow into the hands of the worst citizens or prosperity prevails where all is divided among very few.
When I consider and turn over in my mind the state of all commonwealths flourishing anywhere today, so help me God, I can see nothing else than a kind of conspiracy of the rich, who are aiming at their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth.
No comments:
Post a Comment