gold-hunger on Europe in destroying the true estimate of leisure, in banishing ceremony from social intercourse, in making letter-writing the style-less, mindless thing it has come to be, in reducing pleasure to what overworked slaves have to have to recreate and amuse them—we all want to be "busy," and are ashamed of what makes for the ease and grace and dignity of life.[1]
This does not mean that Nietzsche fails to appreciate what industry and commerce are doing for our time—he even says that it is the commercial class who keep us from falling back into barbarism (having in mind telegraphs, geographical explorations, industrial inventions, etc.).[2] It is not commerce, but the motives behind it, the methods it too often pursues, that lead to reflections like those cited. Men are after money, and do almost anything for a rich return.[3] He finds exchange honorable and just, when each party is guided by the thought of what an article is worth (taking into account a variety of factors that determine worth); but when either is influenced by the thought of the needs of the other, he is only a refined robber and extortioner.[4] He notes that the merchant and the pirate were for a long time one and the same person, bartering being resorted to when force was not expedient; and current business morality now is really only a refinement of pirate morality—the maxim being to buy as cheaply and sell as dearly as possible.[5] It is accordingly the mark of the higher type of man not to be at home in trade. For a teacher, an official, an artist to sell his ability for the highest price, or to practise usury with it, is to drop to the shop-keeper's level.[6] A principal cause of bad conditions in Germany is, that there are far too many living off trade and wishing to live well there—hence reducing prices to the utmost limit to producers, raising them to the utmost limit to consumers, and drawing profit from the greatest possible injury to both.[7]
