Of the four passions we have enumerated, only one, namely
acquisitiveness, is concerned at all directly with men's relations to
their material conditions. The other three--vanity, rivalry, and love
of power--are concerned with social relations. I think this is the
source of what is erroneous in the Marxian interpretation of history,
which tacitly assumes that acquisitiveness is the source of all
political actions. It is clear that many men willingly forego wealth
for the sake of power and glory, and that nations habitually sacrifice
riches to rivalry with other nations. The desire for some form of
superiority is common to almost all energetic men. No social system
which attempts to thwart it can be stable, since the lazy majority
will never be a match for the energetic minority.
What is called "virtue" is an offshoot of vanity: it is the habit of
acting in a manner which others praise.
The operation of material conditions may be illustrated by the
statement (Myers's _Dawn of History_) that four of the greatest
movements of conquest have been due to drought in Arabia, causing the
nomads of that country to migrate into regions already inhabited. The
last of these four movements was the rise of Islam. In these four
cases, the primal need of food and drink was enough to set events in
motion; but as this need could only be satisfied by conquest, the four
secondary passions must have very soon come into play.
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