Vices

TWO DEVILS

1 Pure vices

It may be true that most virtues are vices in disguise, as La Rochefoucauld showed. But aren’t many vices merely more costly virtues? ‘Many might go to heaven with half the labour they go to hell,’ as Jonson wrote. My self-interest and vanity prick me with the stigmata of a saint just so that I can earn a clerk’s scant pay.

We suspect that the virtues of others are vices in disguise, but that what seem like our vices are virtues in disguise.

My vices are not pure, though it’s not virtue that contaminates them. When my motives are not mixed, they are all bad. And if, as Kant says, only those acts are good that are done solely for the sake of abstract duty, then very few good acts have ever been done.

There may be some people who have the vices of their own virtues, as Sand said. But don’t most of us have the vices of other people’s virtues?

Some virtues are closer kin to certain vices than they are to their fellow virtues. Courage has more in common with violence than with pity. Justice drives us to take vengeance as well as to give charity. And prudence is nearer to greediness than to generosity.

2 Shut in your devils and parade your angels

When you shut one devil out, you don’t see that you shut another in. And when you bolt the door to keep out one tempter, it is some other that helps you to hold it closed.

We are fond of parading our virtues where there is least call for them. Irresolute people love to show off their staunchness where they are not in jeopardy. And mean people love to proffer what would cost them nothing to give. And the cruel love to flaunt their gratuitous chivalry by sparing a victim who is sure to be pilloried anyway. We like to give poignant voice to our gratitude when there is no one in especial that we have to be beholden to.

3 Virtue is a balance of opposing vices

Most of us are too callous to be cruel, too smug to envy, too jaded to betray, too pleased with our lot to lose heart, too greedy to sit idle, too inconstant to nurse a long vendetta. Some of us have such grave faults, that we need to grow strenuously good in order to get the better of them. Virtue is a balance of conflicting vices. We don’t hold fast to a single vice because we give our hearts to such a jostle of them.

The just relish those deeds that meld right and wrong. The wrong wakes their compulsions, and the right lulls to sleep their watchdog conscience. ‘What we all love,’ wrote Clough, ‘is good touched up with evil.’

We have to be shamed into virtue, and corrupted into rectitude. ‘So unaccountable is our predicament,’ Montaigne says, ‘that we are led by vice itself to do good.’

4 The two devils

Two dark angels hold us in their spell. There is our roguish Mephistopheles, who is mocking, impish and malign. And there is the cool devil of profit, the prince of this world, who is grave, reputable, discreet, grasping and well-liked. He keeps you to cautious crimes and cautious virtues, and bans any kind that strays from the beaten path. And he warns you not to do wrong, but abets you in absconding when you do.

The prince of this world advocates none but necessary evil, since he knows that those who have sold their souls need only be perfectly righteous to gain the whole world. Like Baudelaire’s merchant, he exhorts, ‘Let us be virtuous, since in this way we shall bag much more cash than the sots who act dishonestly.’ And we think that we are on the side of the angels, because we keep aloof from all the devils save the one that the world adores.

5 The prince of this world

The devil’s disciples are sure that they are doing God’s work.

The Lord may have made our metal, but it’s the fiend that beats it to the shape he wills.

God made this globe for us to thrive in, and the prince of sin to teach us how. God’s existence accounts for the creation, and the devil’s accounts for all that followed. The Lord made heaven and earth, but Satan made the world, both the best and the worst of it. God may be the chairman of the board, but he leaves its day-to-day running to Lucifer, his trusty lieutenant. God may be a metaphysically necessary being, but to judge from the state of the world, it is the devil that is more practically necessary. And yet who has not seen enough of sin and viciousness to believe in the fiend, or enough of our own rapacious race not to need to?

God may have made the world, but it must have been the devil that filled it with life. He is the god of the living. And he is happy to leave the dead to the good Lord.

God abandoned the world, seeing that his grace was not wanted. And the devil did the same, seeing that his malice was not needed.

In this world to have God on your side is the next best thing to having the devil. And the sanctimonious are in the saddle since they have the both of them.

6 Anger

I give way to anger, because I can’t control myself, or in an attempt to control others.

Anger is the screech which naked will emits when it grates on the unyielding steel of circumstance.

Fury is the sudden explosion of a will that has been long compressed by its own ineffectiveness.

A person in a rage acts like a man who tries to cure a headache by hammering himself on the head.

When you sense that you’re annoying people, you may be tempted to keep on doing it, to prove to them that you don’t mind or that they ought not.

As Franklin points out, lose your temper and you have lost the debate. Hold on to your good humour, and you won’t need to find good reasons.

GREED

7 Greed

Our greed is a calculating insanity.

How profitless for philosophy to recommend what all deem to be good. But how vain for it to do otherwise. No one dares to speak up for a vice such as greed, since no one needs to, as all of us live to serve it. As Johnson said, ‘You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live happily on a plentiful income.’

People feel an almost religious ardour and voluptuous pleasure in the squalid details of the things that bring them profit.

The racket of our hectic greed has drowned out the sad canticle of our forlorn hopes. How could we hear the voices of the luckless and the lost above the buzz of our devices and the fizz of our churning desires? ‘Man was made to mourn,’ as Burns wrote. But now all that we care to do is chortle and make money and forget.

Greed will do what it thinks it needs to do in its rage to get what it does not need.

The eye began as the organ of greed, the ear as the organ of fear. Our nose was the organ of disgust, touch was the sense of love, and taste of deliciousness.

How low people will stoop, if they have some mean gain in view, and some high principle to serve as a pretext for seeking it.

8 Greed drains life of its meaning

We lose ourselves in our mad haste to gain so much costly trash. We have drained the globe of meaning by clogging it with objects. Greed fills up each of our lives, and hollows out life as a whole.

Life leaks away, and we try to bung its holes with dollars and refill it with our bottomless wants. We boom along trying to sweep up more and more of what we crave, so that we won’t have to see what a handful of sand it all adds up to.

Piling up wealth is a waste of life. But so much of life counts for so little, that it could be called a mere waste of money.

We have cheapened all that is truly precious by subjecting it to the sordid touchstone of wealth. And so what choice do we have but to sell our souls to get as much of it as we can? When we can weigh and count everything, the sole gauge of value comes to be quantity. And when we can measure most goods, we denigrate the few that we can’t. So we will stop at nothing now to seize as much as we can of what is most readily measured.

The whole world is in our hearts. That must be why they are so empty.

9 The false perspective of possession

How vast an object looks when it’s out of your reach. But how soon it shrinks once you’ve got it in your clutch. I call grapes sour when I fail to obtain them, but would they have tasted so sweet if I had caught hold of them?

All the things you possess threaten to possess you. You never really own what you have got. It owns you.

How jovially I could abjure most of the things that I drool for, if only I were first accorded a great glut of them. ‘Many disrespect wealth,’ as La Rochefoucauld notes, ‘but few know how to give it away.’

We tally what we have gained and lost with minute irrationality. I prize a bargain or rue a loss out of all proportion to the sum I make or lose by it. A skinny but tangible gain or loss weighs heavier with me than a far bulkier intangible one. My winnings don’t please me half as much as my deficits grieve me, so it’s lucky that I can eke them out with my boasting. I feel each loss like an unmerited wound. But I take windfalls for granted as my right.

10 Greed and death

Life is greed, thirsting for one more day, for one more brief taste of sugar.

Consumerism has changed how people feel about death. Now they are not even afraid to die. They are just too grasping to let go of this life which has given them so little. They seem to be reborn with each fresh desire. And they feel that they will never die, since there is always one more want to fulfil. So they no longer fear death as the king of terrors. They merely resent it as the cessation of all their getting and spending. It cuts short their career of guzzling and devouring. Life is what is next, and they hate death, because when it comes, nothing at all is next. But they are too busy cramming their maw to give it much thought.

The smallest joy or the direst misery make us feel that we are never going to die.

Our immortal soul has shrunk to a bustling shopper, bent on reliving its crass fantasies till the world goes to hell.

11 The brutal solidity of money

We are ghosts striving to devour as much as we can in our rage to gain some substance in this spectral world.

We hoard like gold nuggets the scum that we have scooped up, since it seems to have so much more solid actuality than we do ourselves.

Money is dense yet abstract. Its density fills up our emptiness, and our fantasies fill out its abstraction. Though it seems so tangible, it turns to wind all that has real worth. It makes all things transitory, liquid and volatile. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’

We can now pile up such fabulous sums of money, that money itself looks as if it were something fabulous and transcendent.

12 Satisfaction

We can’t get our fill of our greed. But since nothing suffices for us, almost anything will do. Junk is good enough for us, so long as we hope to grab enough of it. We would rather want anything at all than not want something. I forge my chains when I choose my iron desires, and these eat into my soul and rust it.

We bring to the banquet a yawning maw, but neither good taste nor gusto. Why can’t we curb our hunger for what we know we don’t even want?

Life is a child’s game in which you play for a prize that you can’t carry home.

Life yields you such meagre fulfilment, that the best you can do is scramble to get more of what has failed to fulfil you.

We have no right either to our discontent or to our self-satisfaction. We don’t aim high enough for either.

When nothing that you get has a value of its own, all you can do is try to get more of it.

13 Greed and nostalgia

Nostalgia, like the rest of our avocations, is now a garnish for our gaping hunger for the bliss which we hope awaits us. It piques us to find new forms in which to reprise our old pleasures. It tries to recapture the past by pandering to our lust for more of the crude stuff that we guzzled then. And it drives us to duplicate in a more opulent form the synthetic sludge that filled our childish dreams. We grind up all that is good in the world, to paste our lives with gaudy nostalgia and anecdotes.

We are tethered to the world from the front by all that we can’t stop desiring and from the back by all that we can’t help remembering. Our cravings and our memories divide up time between them, and leave nothing for the present. By living in the past, present and future, we multiply the dimensions of our misery.

14 Greed the moral controller

In this age it is greed and not God that wards off moral misrule. Avid wants incite us, but also keep us in order so that we can seize our cut of them. Avariciousness, Tocqueville said of the americans, ‘disturbs their minds but disciplines their lives.’

Greed is the great peacemaker. What’s the point of keeping up all those old quarrels, if they don’t make any money?

Moral regeneration trudges like a halting gleaner at the heels of speedily advancing greed. Pity hobbles in the rear, as avarice strides on to its electric dawn. ‘The greatest meliorator of the world,’ Emerson says, ‘is selfish, huckstering trade.’

Philanthropy spiritualizes our lust for gain. Grasping individualism thrills to the spectacle of random and unavailing charity. It throws a sop to our conscience, while leaving in place the system of privilege from which we are profiting. We dole out charity so that we can withhold justice.

The dream of do-gooders is to raise the poor to the same level of rapacious affluence as the rich.

15 Greed the false moralist

Hopeful greed learns to enthuse, and thwarted greed loves to moralize. Sellers must learn to gush effusively. And those who have got a lower price than they hoped dredge up some moral law which they say has been infringed. ‘As soon as one is unhappy,’ Proust says, ‘one grows moral.’ And by being moral we hope to blight others with our unhappiness. I have money troubles, because others have moral flaws. I would have more in the bank, if they had more integrity.

The rich have so much wealth, say the poor, that it’s all one whether they gain or lose. And the poor have so little, think the rich, that it’s all one if they gain or lose. The poor are playing for such small stakes, and the rich should have no need to win. Yet both will balk at no trick to boost their odds in the game.

The poor, who can’t afford it, must pay for all that they get. And the rich, who can get all they want, are too jaded to enjoy it.

The poor can’t see why the rich won’t flick them a few scraps from their vast treasury. And the strong can’t see why the weak don’t just die and leave the world to them who have the strength to make use of it.

16 Justifying greed

We chatter about our aspirations, but we mean our avarice. Our dreams garnish our greed, and our greed gives body to our dreams. And we keep spawning more and more expensive fancies, to justify our sharp-toothed voracity.

We have to keep multiplying our wants so as to give some purpose to our vast wealth. And we need to keep adding to our desires, because we have to find some pretext for piling up all that wealth that we don’t need. What was all that frantic accumulation for, if we could have satisfied our needs with so much less trouble?

17 Love and money

Constant in our selfishness, we grow inconstant to one another. How wantonly we wound the hearts of those we love, in our hunger to glut our own with the coarse stuffs which fail to content us. We are always gazing past them to some gaudy toy that we hope to grab. They don’t ask much from us, and we are loath to give them even that. We could so easily make them happy, but we are too busy doing what will make us unhappy. And all the small things that we withheld from them come back to haunt us when they are gone.

18 The addiction of avarice

Money addicts us but fails to intoxicate us. I dread to lose the things that it gave me no joy to own. ‘Riches,’ as Epicurus says, ‘do not exhilarate us with their possession as much as they macerate us with their loss.’

We drudge like donkeys, whipped on through the joyless years by our wants, broken by the weight of all that we have gained and lost. How little we have to show for a life devoted to extortionate greed. The scant victories that life rations out to us are not worth all the venal devotion that they cost us.

Our greed keeps us in too much of a spin to learn how best to placate it. I’m scuttling so furiously to grab what I want, how could I find time to chart the most undeviating route to reach it?

Wealth frees you from every kind of captivity, save that of having to waste all your time labouring to stash up more of it.

19 Competitive desire

You learn what you want for yourself by competing with others. And when you compete with them you learn to want more and more.

Life is a mad scramble for things that you wouldn’t want if you didn’t have the chance to heap up more of them than others.

We’re all in this together. That’s why we have to tear each other apart to come out of it with more than everyone else.

We could easily get what we want, but we waste our lives jostling to get what the rest of the world wants.

All that we gobble swells our faith in our uniqueness by exhibiting our taste or wealth. Half the pleasure that people take in a thing springs from the pride that they feel in their own success, that they possess the means to procure it and the taste to enjoy it. They deem they must deserve the best because they are the best. And they know that they are the best because they have got the best.

Beauty is the polish that people’s self-satisfaction imparts to their possessions. They look at them and see their own success reflected.

The lust to gain makes us prize the object, but possession makes us preen ourselves on the skill we showed in gaining it.

20 The consumer

A child is a natural consumer, and a consumer is an overgrown and unnatural child. Both of them drool for the confected and the flashy, the cosy, instant and saccharine. And now that we have all become as little children, the only kingdom that we are fit to enter is the voracious kingdom of global cupidity.

The child in the bosom of the loving family learns that happiness comes from amassing material goods.

It is not the astonished philosopher who retains the heart of a child, but the acquisitive trader, whose aim is to grab as many toys as possible to play with and show off.

Each plump devourer now feels like a little Napoleon or king Ubu, a triumphant gullet that has wolfed its way through such fat years.

We love the world because we think we have such a large stake in it.

Our expensive pleasures assure us that we’ve made it.

Our pleasures are so hollow, that we have to fill them up with our self-satisfaction. And our self-satisfaction is so full, that it makes us buoyant and expansive.

To live in this age is to have too much and to lack the self-control not to want to get more.

We take it that life is worth just as much as we can consume. And so we are frantic to consume as much as we can lay our hands on.

21 Making do

If we can’t get what we want, we learn to want whatever it is we think we can get.

We crave so much. We make do with so little. And yet nothing satisfies us. Such dull pleasures tickle us. But a world would not be enough for us.

We are often satiated, but we are never satisfied. We skip straight from hunger to satiety without stopping at enjoyment.

You rise from the table of life famished and yet nauseated, but still craving more.

How little I need, until I wake up to how much I might have the chance to get.

Desire is a river in spate. It is not a standing lake. We may think that we want to fill it, but all we want is that it rush life on as fast as it can. And so long as it is in motion we don’t much care whether it is turbid with misery or sparkling with joy.

22 Insatiable vices

Our nature could be satisfied with so little. But it’s our nature not to be satisfied with a single thing. We did not need to need this much. But we are lashed on by a fundamental need to want more than we fundamentally need. How easily we could have all that we require, if we could just stop clambering to snatch all that we don’t even want.

It’s not the having but the getting that we love. So how could we ever say enough? A sip or two of life ought to be enough to sicken us. But we can never get our fill of it.

Life is insatiable yet mendicant. Even those to whom it has given a few stale crusts will stop at nothing to get a crumb more.

We can set a bourne to our physical proclivities for food or sex, but not to our societal drives of venality, contention, maliciousness or revenge. Each joys or sorrow, bane or blow acts as grist to swell our selfishness. I want more than I foresaw I would. But I need less than I think I do. The importunity of my own greed dismays me as much as that of others appals me. People are not uniformly better or worse than you surmise, but they all crave more than you suspect. Those who don’t want much still want more. And even those who have moderate cravings still crave them immoderately.

23 No class is impervious to greed

No class is impervious to the blight of greed. The penniless may seem to be, since they have not yet got as much as they want. We mistake incapacity for disinterest. Wealth may impoverish, but indigence does not enrich. The poor are just as covetous and crooked as the rich, but their privation gives them less scope to show it.

Greed is low and insinuating enough to worm its way into the heart of the masses, though we claim that it blights none but a small clique of plutocrats.

The tame and weak might inherit the earth, but why would they want it? Are their dreams as vile and venal as those of the proud who tread them down?

If the meek inherit the earth, they won’t stay meek for long. Or if they do, they won’t keep the earth for long.

The poor are worn down by life’s abrasions, and the rich are overworn by all the accretions of flotsam that they’ve skimmed up.

One half of the world is a slave to scarcity, and one half to surfeit. And now both join in a confederacy to enslave the untainted earth to their shared greed for more and more.

CORRUPTION

24 Corruption and the vices

The independent are incorruptible. But it’s the corrupt that are indispensable. It is they who keep the world running so smoothly. The self-sufficing are too proud to submit and too disengaged to rebel.

We betray routinely in order to get what we want, not purposely to spread our beliefs.

The world is not content just to see pure souls defiled. It wants to see them of their own free will defile themselves. And it pays a high stipend to those who have a gift for respectably depraving the innocent.

How keen I am to be corrupted, if I get the chance. And how sullenly I hug my virtue, if I don’t. Some people weren’t made for this world, and yet were not made for a better one. Are there any more pitiful than the few whom the world has had no need to seduce? They are left beached on their desert island of integrity, desperate to be called like the rest of us to a life of gainful connivance.

The world has no need to corrupt us, we corrupt our own hearts by wanting it too much. It is still a magic zone, so long as you are not bewitched by it.

Opportunity may make a petty thief. But a great rogue makes every occasion an opportunity for pious swindling.

The world has always been as raddled with corruption as it is now, but at no time have the inducements to it been so vast.

25 Vices, ideals and compromise

We live our real life through our compromises with the world. The blurred prints of my ideals fail to come in to sharp focus. Most of us mislay our ideals before we get the chance to barter them.

Few of us believe so much in our moral codes as to be capable of betraying them.

We have no lack of principles, but they are too polite to get in the way of our pushing self-interest.

Those who have no faith are not hard to suborn, since no convictions hold them back. And those who do have faith are not hard to suborn, since they’ll stop at nothing to push their cause, which is worth just as much to them as the devotion that they have invested in it.

Some people lie with no compunction because they have no principles, and some because they are serving such lofty ones.

26 The small rewards of corruption

Our schemes and desires debauch and diminish us. But most of them yield us so little pleasure that we think them quite innocent. They tempt us not into crime but into littleness. But they lend us an exalted stature in our own and others’ eyes.

Lawyers have figured out that the best scams are the legal ones. Honesty is for them a commercial calculation.

‘Most people sell their souls,’ said Logan Smith, ‘and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.’ But most of us don’t see that we have done so, since we have got such a small return for it. The price of souls stays low, because there’s such a queue lining up to bargain each day.

27 The soul unmade

Does anyone feel so burningly irate as those who have sold their soul and not received the world?

We are willing to sell a lot more than our souls to gain a lot less than the world. But most of us have no soul to traffic. So what we trade is the chance to mould one. This life is, as Keats said, a vale of soul-making. But you pass through it most smoothly if you don’t have one to make. Those who have gained the world are glad to find that they had no soul to lose. How could you find time to make a fortune, if you had first to make a soul?

Some people are so high-minded, that they can’t bring themselves to sell their souls, till the buyer offers them a good cause as well as a good price.

Society is a system of conveniences which gives us the means to thrive without a soul.

28 All traitors

In this double-dealing world even the perfidious may be betrayed by their own conniving loyalties.

An unfeeling corporation, such as a bank, can be counted on more than the most upstanding individual.

We put our trust in people, not because we have faith in their good will, but because we know that they fear the law.

People’s competence is of more use to us than their probity.

We are all traitors. We just don’t agree on what country we belong to. And we keep up our faithfulness by our opportune defections.

Don’t we betray most eagerly those ideals that we know are too good for us? We are glad to sling off their yoke and to prove that they could not have been worth our allegiance since they were too weak to keep it.

The institution that people have served devotedly for years they would be happy to see implode the day after they leave it. What stronger proof could there be of how indispensable they were?

29 The ruses of treachery

Most of us have too much guile to act like patent traitors. So I withhold my disloyalty as warily as I withhold my assent.

When you hear someone extolling trust, look out for your independence.

We conceal our curiosity so that those whom we plan to entrap will entrust us with their secrets. Who has not cast out a small confession of their own as bait to net more compromising disclosures from others?

We hitch our wagon to the treacherous. We sense that no one is more fit to get on in this devious world and drag us up in their train.

Some of us can think of no more convincing way to prove our fealty than by offering others as an oblation to it.

Where you need merely collude to prove your loyalty, you may turn renegade to hold fast to your truth.

30 The bond of perfidy

The most worthless cause may command the most unwavering loyalty. And the worst and most meretricious ones are apt to rouse the strongest and sincerest passions.

In order to bring down one person, ten must stand by their sacred pact of trust.

If you want people to trust you, there are a bevy of things that you have to be ready to betray.

It’s the disloyal to whom we give unwonted devotion. We spot their duplicity but stay affixed to them. So they have our bad faith and fear, which knit sturdier cords than normal fidelity. Only the most wholehearted adherents will still stick to you once they have witnessed your lies. No glue holds more firm than that of shared but unadmitted perfidy. Treason is the most reliable token of trust. You know that you can lean on someone, when you have securely leagued with them to double-cross a third party.

31 Loyalty looks away

We cleave to our self-serving loyalties because we lack any principle which might sever us from them.

The most trustworthy partisans are those who refuse to see the truth regarding the people or the cause that they serve. To stay loyal to persons, you must avert your eyes from the truth. And to stay loyal to the truth, you would have to turn your back on persons. We trust others, not because we have found them honest, but because we know that we can count on them not to be. We trust that they will pretend to share our self-deceits and not blurt out what might hurt us.

Tell the truth, and you will lose the trust of all. Hold fast to your integrity, and they will all desert you. The world is sure to make a fool of you, if you are so foolish as to refuse to fool yourself.

You showed him what he is. Needless to say, he didn’t believe you. But he will never forgive you.

Life is a treacherous game, in which the worst form of betrayal is to tell the stark truth.

COWARDICE

32 Cowardice

Some people lack the courage to be constant cowards. So they have to shrink life to a regimen so strait and safe, that they seldom need to act timidly.

Some poltroons sleepwalk into danger, because they lack the nerve to wake up and face their real fears.

Cowards, like tottering autocracies or our ebbing democracies, squander their strength battling phantom enemies, because they lack the firmness to discern who their real foes are.

In order to keep up their courage, some cowards have to steel one another with the dangerous lie that their enemies lack the grit to put up a fight.

The valiant never taste of death but once. It’s the faint-hearted who chew it over through the whole of life, and thus get to know all its flavours. The coward must be braver than the hero. A hero need face only the danger. Cowards must face all their fears, which never let go of them. The danger done, their fears dream new terrors. Poltroons suffer far more from their anxieties than the brave suffer from their enemies.

Cowards tend to treat most amicably those whom they like least. They dread lest their dislike will be detected. And being cowards they quail at what they hate.

The world’s not safe, now that there’s so much paranoia around.

33 Shocked into daring

Fear jolts some people to acts of mad fearlessness. And it foists on others such a long and exasperating circumspection, that they are at last stung to act rashly just where rashness will bring them to ruin. ‘Timorousness,’ as Clausewitz wrote, ‘will do a thousand times more damage than audaciousness.’

A sudden upset shocks some cowards into daring. The crisis strikes with such rapidity, that they don’t have time to put on their wonted indecision. They drop their habit of dread, and forget to be craven. Their impulsiveness lands them in enemy territory, before their cowardice can catch up and bundle them back to safety. Once they’ve sallied out on a foray, they need the headstrong mettle to encounter all threats, since they lack the resolution to retreat. As Fuller wrote, ‘Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.’

How many risks people are willing to take in order to feel safe.

Fools have no choice but to act fearlessly, since they don’t dare to be wise and sit still.

34 The cowardice to stay alive

In order to go on living, you need as much cowardice as courage, as much foolhardiness as prudence, as much insensitiveness as attentiveness, as much forgetfulness as remembering, and a lot more self-deception than truth.

Suicide is a crazed and craven act, which few of us have the sense or courage to commit. The ones who do need the deserter’s desperate recklessness. How could they have been so mad, to end it all, and give up their chance to go on with their life of busy futility? They must screw up their resolve for a moment, since they can’t bear to have patience for a lifetime. Pride nerves you to stay alive. And if it fails, then fear and shame have to do it.

We lack the decision simply to die. So we need to keep up the vitality to dance.

Suicide, like all consolations, comes too soon to be needed or too late to be of use. But most are too late. If they were not, there would have been no need for them. Suicides know that their life will go on interminably, if they don’t put a stop to it this day.

Are suicides more desperate to evade their future or to erase their past?

We are rats in a maze scampering to locate the way out but debarred from taking the nearest one.

35 Cowardice loves cruelty

Cowards prize the cold aggression of their protectors, too craven to fear that they might one day use it to hurt them. They cheer on any kind of cruelty that makes them feel more secure. How else do the faithful adore their god?

Bullies are not cowards. If they were, the world would be in a far better state. Nor are tyrants sadists. And if bullies are cowards, what cowards we must be, to give in to them all the time. Cowards love a bully, so long as they hope that his bullying might help them.

Fear bids us entrust our safety to people of dubious valour, whom we think brave because they have a brand of cowardice that is not like our own. And we love tyrants who promise to keep us safe, even when they put us in worse peril.

Some people are more dangerous when they are sane, and are most lucid when they are mad.

Paranoids are prone to put their trust in the most dangerous people.

CRUELTY

36 The vices of cruelty

Honour and its codes rest on a vast deal of cruelty, both to oneself and to one’s rivals. In them shame is more to be shunned than torture, and pride is worth more than life.

We take pride in our hardness of heart, as if it were a duty that we owed to our unique mission.

Squeamish people can be the most cruel. They are able to feel the pain of others, and so may gain some relish from the infliction of it. And though they quiver at the small unkindnesses of day-to-day life, they may be numb to its real atrocities.

37 Too callous or too calculating to be cruel

Few of us are cruel, not because we feel others’ pangs too piquantly, but because we don’t feel them much at all. It is not our deep sympathy but our bland indifference that saves us from being vicious. We are too heartless and insensible to take pleasure in maltreating others. Only those who feel what others suffer could enjoy torturing them. We picture the pain of others too dimly to savour causing it or to writhe in rapport with it. And we need responsive victims to pique our sadism. Torturers don’t waste their rack or thumbscrews on stones.

Cruelty calls for as much imagination as kindness, and for far more than we are ready to lend it or than our cool affability asks of us.

Children don’t care what they do, so long as they get a new sensation out of it. And at their age, few sensations seem more delicious than causing pain to others. They love to play at cruelty. Like cats, they dabble in it with an offhand curiosity. It tickles us when we are young and unstained by the world. But as we grow up our calculating interest cautions us to drop it, since it fails to yield us the pleasure or profit that we hoped for. Like innocence, cruelty is as natural in an infant as it is abhorrent in an adult. It leaves most of us at the same age as our purity of heart.

ENVY

38 Envy and vices

It is not merit that we envy but fortune. We don’t doubt that we have more than enough merit, and lack only the good luck to profit from it. ‘Most people,’ as Chesterfield wrote, ‘complain of fortune, few of nature.’ I feel jealous not of what others are or of what they do but of what they get. And I don’t want to get what they have got but what they have not got. I want to show that I could get better than they have got. And if I do envy what they have, I think them the more unworthy for having it.

When we envy, we set ourselves aflame to light up the fine deeds of our rivals.

I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of those for whom I feel a genuine awe. They have plain and costly virtues, and I prefer my cheap and crafty ones.

39 Too conceited to envy

The disease of envy is cured by the same conceit that caused it. ‘The pride that rouses in us so much envy,’ says La Rochefoucauld, ‘often conduces to moderate it.’

We don’t think well enough of people to envy them, though we would be right to envy them, if we knew how well they think of themselves. Their talents may not be worth envying, but their self-assurance is. And it may be that we are most apt to envy those who we feel are below us. They can lounge at their ease, and are not racked by the sort of aspirations that harry us.

I think so highly of my merits, that I assume others must envy me. But they think so highly of their own, that they don’t. I suspect that those who dislike me must feel jealous of me. But they feel less jealous than I fear or desire.

All the gifts of fortune are wasted on most people, since they have such mean talents, though at times I fear that my vast talents might go to waste because of my bad luck.

‘Envy,’ as Gay said, ‘is a kind of praise.’ And we set too much store by our own gifts to pay our rivals the tribute of jealousy. Envy stews, but admiration froths. Our own conceit cools our praise, and checks it from simmering over into jealousy. Envy is the most reluctant and hence the frankest form of praise. Why else would it be so rare?

40 We would rather pity than envy

I pity or depreciate people for the lack of some small gift that I have, instead of envying them for a great one that I lack. He may own a billion dollars, but can he play chequers like me? And just look at that shirt he’s got on. ‘He is a poor creature,’ Butler says, ‘who does not believe himself to be better than the whole world else.’

My pity sets me above those whom I pity. But my envy would place me below those whom I envy. Our pity is as gratifying to us as our envy would be mortifying.

We like to believe that we pity others nearly as much as we like to believe that they envy us.

41 We would rather be envied than pitied

No one envies, but we all hope to be envied, and most of us assume that we are. Envy keeps us in its grip, not because we envy our rivals, but because we burn to be envied by them.

We all think so much of others that we want to be envied by them. And yet no one thinks enough of us to envy us.

We would all prefer to be envied than pitied, as the proverb says. So why make envy a sin and pity a virtue? Your jealousy would flatter people more than your kind heart could help them. If you wished to do unto them as you would have them do to you, you should show that you think them enviable rather than pitiable.

REVENGE

42 The vices and virtues of revenge

Some revengeful people have to turn their hearts to stone, so that they won’t vibrate unendingly to the sneers and stripes that they dream they meet with.

How slyly revenge slinks into the most effusive eulogy.

How I hate those who have hurt a hair of the one whom I love and have hurt much more.

Revenge is a kind of violent restorative. We are needled to take revenge because we are weak enough to be wounded, but strong enough to wound in return.

Ordinary avengers put their victims to the knife. Outstanding ones, like Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth, seduce, dismantle and instruct them, rendering them participants in their own demolition. And the gods scheme with the dumb world to wreak just such a subtle retribution on the best and the worst of us.

You know how low you’ve fallen, when your rivals don’t even think it worth their while to crow over you.

43 Vengeance, victim and vices

The cycle of revenge would soon run down, if it were only tit-for-tat. But many people take vengeance not on the real cause of their injury but on some weaker substitute whom they can get at more safely.

All successful revenges are self-inflicted. And, as Pavese said, ‘there is no finer requital than that which others visit on your enemy.’ Though the best of all is the revenge that your enemies visit on themselves.

Some people are their own worst enemies, and that’s the best thing that can be said for them. They relieve you of the need to lift a hand against them. And they are kind enough to do unto themselves as you would have done to them.

I can wound others so badly because I see their weak spots. And I can’t help wounding myself so badly because I don’t know my own.

44 The rewards of revenge

Revenge is a prime duty of honour, equity and defiance. Hence it gains less pay than the rest of the wily virtues in this world of chill utility and rectitude.

Indifference is the one kind of requital that costs you less than the person it is meant for.

Vengeful people learn that vengeance always founders, and this rankles as one more wrong that the world does them. What meal looks more appetizing or turns out to be less filling than retaliation?

The sole reprisals that I regret are my ill-judged or unnecessary ones. But which of my reprisals are not?

The most arduous retributions are those that must rely on the justness of their claims. Injustice would have had readier confederates and a smoother passage through this rough and thorny world.

 

See also:       Virtues,              Conscience