To allow yourself to be loved by another is to put yourself totally in his or her power, to hand him or her the means of your destruction, because, by and large, we love one another only as objects.

... we are for the most part utterly impervious to the moral intention or significance of our conduct, and on the whole what we do is evaluated mainly in terms of what it achieves for the enhancement of our image and the augmentation of our power, status, and material advantage.

The social havoc wreaked by unfettered economic greed comes to be interiorised as the personal weakness and irresponsibility of those principally affected.

There is, I suggest, a strong positive correlation between a) the height of the rung occupied on the ladder of power, b) the strength of a sense of personal virtue, and c) the firmness of the conviction that those lower down could and certainly should act more responsibly.