Anyway I embrace the edgelord version of the attack on Scrooge just as they're taking an edgelord defense of it Even ignoring the fact that he's an asshole with no friends, the "good things" about Scrooge are bad things A high household savings rate is a negative moral failing
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Scrooge would be a better person if he wasted every penny he earned on booze and drugs and collectible figurines or whatever and he died with his books in the red He'd be paying people's wages and enabling them to pay other people's wages if he did so
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Scrooge's sympathetic reason for his greed isn't the deadly sin of gluttony, which everyone in that era would be happy to unanimously condemn His avarice is born of simple fear of poverty Which is very understandable, but the worst sins are driven by such fears
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Money is only a way of keeping score, after all What does "I want to get and stay rich so I need never fear being poor" actually mean It means "I want to always have more power than the people around me, to make them work for me so they can't make me work for them"
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And yeah, that's evil It's a small, subtle evil compared to if he wanted to use his wealth to sexually exploit his workers or something But it's still evil "It's more important for me to know I'll always have a roof over my head than to worry about other people's"
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"In fact it's of positive benefit to me that they live in fear so I live in security Other people will be desperate for work because they don't know where their next meal is coming from, and that means I can always order a meal at a cheap price"
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It doesn't sound like sin but it's THE great sin, from which all the miseries of our current age originate
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Ultimately, he didn't hate poverty, he loved that it existed. He just didn't want to be there himself. Poverty as moral failing, poverty as punishment for sin. And if that's true, then wealth is the opposite. Wealth is a sign of moral health, of reward for good deeds.
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Replying to @UnknownEnby @arthur_affect
And then conservatives look at Dickens and think "Aha, being wealthy isn't bad, so the real sin of Scrooge is that he was working on Christmas" and turn it into the Kranks
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Replying to @UnknownEnby
The whole thing about the Kranks is they turn it into a binary choice between spending thousands of dollars on the stupid neighborhood Christmas decorating contest or spending the money on themselves for a cruise The question of giving the money to charity never comes up
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I mean, in a perverse way I appreciate that, because if you put it like that it'd be obvious what the "true spirit of Christmas" was, which is why they avoid it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @UnknownEnby
My "Bah humbug" side says even if Luther Krank wants to spend the money completely selfishly that's more valid than having to participate in this stupid bougie suburban ritual that's really just a celebration of wealth without actually enjoying it
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Yep, wealth and poverty are never discussed. It hollows out the core and just gets left with "celebrating Christmas is good and mandatory". Because all that stuff about money is too challenging.
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