Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that money is indifferent to our moral judgments and continues to grow in influence and power.
Martin Amis reflects on the nature of money as a powerful entity that transcends our negative perceptions of it. He describes money as a 'fiction' that people become addicted to, highlighting how it operates within societal structures in ways that can feel conspiratorial. This perspective invites us to question our relationship with money, recognizing its allure and potential harms while acknowledging its pervasive presence in modern life.
In practice
During a financial seminar, to highlight the complexities of money and ethics.
Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark - spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.
You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?
All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.
Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
Although Verwoerd thought Africans were lower than animals, his death did not yield us any pleasure. Political assassination is not something I or the ANC ever supported. It is a primitive way of contending with an opponent
Although a biologist, I must confess I do not understand how life came about... I consider that life only starts at the level of a functional cell. The most primitive cells may require at least several hundred different specific biological macro-molecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together, remains a mystery to me. The possibility of the existence of a Creator, of God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem.
Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?
We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing.
To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed.
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