13/12/2025
"One must add to this the modern economy, which is increasingly oriented not to man’s standard needs, as it always had been, but to the satisfactions that its ever-new products give consumers: it strives to loosen all the restrictions everywhere that might impede their acquisition. Under pressure from the economy, all obstacles, resistance, and opposition to the ideology of pleasure it promotes, break down in those areas of life concerned with sexuality, the exact locus of the height of pleasure. The case of the pharmaceutical industry is typical: it floods the market with contraceptives and abortifacients. Instead of helping a life that is sick or in decline, it destroys life that is healthy and growing. A technical and economic “civilization” based solely on the gratification of the ipsemet, of the self, can only destroy the conditions necessary for the emergence and development of the virtue of temperance—whose first condition is a sense of shame—because it destroys society itself and turns man in on himself and his lower organs: quorum deus venter est.
No longer having any relationship with others except at the convergence of interests in material goods, which are always individual—a collectivity, that abstraction, does not consume, but rather individuals in flesh and blood—the human being is isolated by the pleasure these goods provide and seeks nothing beyond that pleasure. The criterion of his action is no longer moral, it is efficiency, achievement, success, always ephemeral, since the very nature of products is to be constantly consumed and constantly replenished so that they may be consumed again by the individuals who are their end. The “consumer society” in which we are immersed—until when?—can only be a “society” where individual pleasure is king. With the political primacy of the common good cast aside, there remain only disassoociated individuals, each seeking his own pleasure."
—Marcel De Corte, "Temperance" (forthcoming English translation)
