Reading the Rich as Sacred Text

AKMA:

...I felt an implacable determination that I mustn’t allow La Bruyère’s aphorism to constrain the bounds of my hermeneutical practise.

In advanced sales classes I now teach students to read the client's life as a Gospel of Wealth. For this I am or should surely be damned. I wake up in a cold sweat, imagining that some wealthy client says, "Look, Jackass, you are not the only Fool in this Dream. I can see right through you."

Comments

[AKMA]

This is one of those circumstances in which I point out to those who question my approach that hermeneutics can't govern the outcome of interpretation; in this case, I'm obliged to say the hermeneutic may be sound, but the ethos might be open to question.

Providentially, I have unwavering faith in you, Phil.

[Phil Cubeta]

Yes, your faith in God is well placed. Your faith in me is touching, as Candidia would say. I have never felt so much like a fraud as now in teaching what are called "priceless conversations," "purposeful conversations," and the like. These conversations work real good.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

God doesn't need our faith nearly as much as we need to have faith in one another. AKMA's faith in you is well placed, as is yours for him.

I'm wondering what you do with those feelings of being a fraud? I think it is like what AKMA was saying about hermeneutics. It provides useful tools for interpretation, but does not replace the interpreter's soul. Knowing about "purposeful conversations" doesn't mean you will use them to manipulate.

[Phil Cubeta]

I suppress my feelings about being a fraud, and they reappear as symptoms. Wealth Bondage is a big fat boil.

[tm]

It has always seemed (at least to me) that the facts of wealth - the conditions and expectations, satisfactions and sins, etc., - of the wealthy was a subject suppressed by the rich, desired by the poor, and envied by the middle classes. But what the wealthy have to say about the meaning of their lives - is this profitable?