The Virtue of Capitalism

Most people don't want the world to move as fast as it does, I think. But we have forgotten how to see things any other way. We go to work for people and corporations whose success depends on moving ahead at a lightning pace. These people and corporations become the ideal of humanity. It no longer matters that they don't give us what we really want, were we to ever remember--modest comforts, earnest employment, and time for family and reflection. Instead, they make greater and greater demands to extract for themselves wealth, recognition, and appeasement of the peculiar desire to give body and soul over to career. Over time, we start to take these qualities as the new ideals of a prosperous society, and wonder how to replace our ideas of earnestness and balance with the total subordination of man and nature to an unnatural competitive will. This unmitigated virtue of capitalism starves all of the other human virtues.