Inherited Wealth

Heard this in an interview by Terry Gross on NPR yesterday:

Terry Gross:

. . . . . thinking about the psychological impact of inherited wealth, the raging desire to get rid of it and the raging desire to hang on to it, the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire, the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich.

Can you talk about the downside of that kind of legacy of money?

Edward St. Aubyn:

Generating their characteristic disguise as the philanthropy solution, the alcoholic solution, the mask of eccentricity, the search for salvation and perfect taste, the defeated, the idle and the frivolous, and their opponents, the standard bearers, all living in world that the dense glitter of alternatives made it hard for love and work to penetrate.

And as we know, Freud famously said that love and work is what keeps us sane. So the downside of this world being talked about there or being thought about . . . is that it's very difficult for love and work to penetrate it.

Why is this so evocative for me? Guess I'll have to read the last volume of Edward St. Aubyn's autobiographical novel? And find out? I think so....