Friday, October 21, 2016
William Hazlitt's essay, "On The Want Of Money", showed his perspective on the true value of money and I am on the same standpoint as Hazlitt when saying money is the root of problems. Hazlitt used repetition frequently throughout his essay. Hazlitt reiterated "it is" a lot in that excerpt and it serves to act as a method of listing consequences of being in want of money in prose. There were a lot of real-life scenarios mentioned and it helped strengthened his argument through the use of examples. One of those real-life scenarios really stood out to me, "it is to be compelled to stand behind a counter, or to sit at a desk in some public office." I strongly agree with that due to my personal experience. I've been getting more active in working part-time jobs as I'm maturing. Sure I'm making money but I've been so distracted by school and work that I barely get to enjoy myself. A good percentage of our lives is dedicated to making money, only leaving us very little of our time to reward ourselves. Hazlitt's word choice "envy, back-biting, and falsehood" also has a very negative tone to it. Those words were used to emphasize how money is one of the main factors the drive jealousy and eventually that jealousy will cause one to be untrue. Take gold diggers as an example; their primary focus when seeking out a mate is money and in turn it causes them to possess this character of being "fake". One can say it's due to the fact that they are in desperate want of money and therefore creating this character of being a gold digger. Hazlitt's connections to real-life scenarios was an effective method of getting his claim across to the readers.
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I agree how the author purpose is to have people view money as a root of many problems in our lives and attaching a very negative tone. However I disagree with the fact that chasing money is a "bad" thing. It gives people a drive to be productive and incentive to work. Like you said, without this incentive, would you just spend your time enjoying yourself? What if people were given things for free? These scenarios are much more scarier than the scenarios he is describing. I truly believe that without the incentive of money, people would be unproductive leading to human accomplishments to regress.
ReplyDeleteI agree with on on the author's position, but I sort of disagree with with your statement and the example used because I felt as if what he meant was that without money this is where you'll most like end up (possibly). Also the root of evil, does that just mean the amount of power one can have with money as to someone who doesn't?
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