Just watched the depressing, almost cynical There Will Be Blood. Hard not to think of it in context of Madoff and Dreier and Lehman, et al. The money for nothing crowd.
From blubber to barrels. Fortunes made out of the richness of the earth and the poverty of men. Centuries of taking out without putting anything back in. To do well while doing good is sustainable. To redefine “doing good” as “doing well” is not. The prosperity theology made explicit in recent years leads neither to wealth nor God.
Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.