Quote: (06-24-2014 08:25 PM)Gringuito Wrote:
Be careful telling someone what to do with the money that they've earned. I would reserve judgement until you've seen firsthand what unearned money does to someone, especially a young person. It has a way of lowering their self esteem. This forum is about self-improvement. What would happen if you are given enough money so that you'll never have to work, improve yourself, accomplish something on your own? If there was always an easy way out of any problem when things got tough. The temptation would always be there. Why learn game if you could throw $50k at a model for the night. Why work out or learn a new language?
Why not do such a thing? Two points.
Firstly, for hundreds and thousands of years, across several cultures, rich people have been patrons of the arts, and even artists themselves. Frederick the Great was a statesman, a general, a philosopher, a composer and spoke multiple languages. His greatest failing was that he did not have children.
Anyway, it is only in our modern, self-indulgent, nihilistic, anti-humanist age where we cannot conceive of anyone being liberated from material necessity using that freedom to pursue higher ends. Because we are surrounded by Paris Hiltons we assume it has ever been thus. The great irony of our age is that we simultaneously think that we have arrived at the end point in history, and yet also think that everyone else in history has also been as depraved as we regard ourselves. We are simultaneously incredibly arrogant in all the wrong ways and full of self-doubt in all the wrong ways.
Secondly, to continue on the theme of liberation, I have resolved never to let my children work a typical part-time job that teenagers have traditionally done (not that such jobs are being taken by teenagers anymore as others have taken them out of necessity). All this baloney of instilling a work ethic is just about instilling what Nietzsche calls slave morality. I want my children to aspire to be entrepreneurs, nobility, artists, not "productive members of society". In the modern West, we lionise the "everyman" as somehow more spiritually pure than the noble, the rich, etc. There are plenty of depraved trust fund children, but the upper class most definitely do not have a monopoly on depravity.
The point, however, is that whilst Chartres Cathedral or the Sistine Chapel may have been made by the hands of ordinary men in a sense, they were not conceived of by them in the main, and they certainly could never have been created without the financial support of the upper class. The modern, democratic state is a poor substitute because although we so often build much bigger things than before, we so rarely build grander things than before.