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C h r y s a l i s II: C a r p a t h i a n L i b e r t y

III

Cultus Avaritus

Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own
misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived
before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are
plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live
in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would
seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your
families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin,
descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the very enemy whom you
yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you bravely go to war, for
whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death…
Still, men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire
anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to
themselves, or as if anyone could possess under a tyrant a single thing in his
own name.
5

Cultus Avaritus – Greed culture; or Culture of Greed

Avarice: Extreme greed for wealth or material gain. Origin - Middle
English from Old French, from Latin avaritia , from avarus ‘greedy.’
6

5 Étienne Boétie, Discours de la Servitude Volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude), written
c.1549. See the English Language reprint - (Boétie, 1975), quote from p. 45 and p. 74.
6 Oxford University Press, en.oxforddictionaries.com, English Oxford Living Dictionaries.