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Comment by freeone3000 | Hacker News Reader

Can you eat honor? Can you sell it? What is the worth of a man besides his ability to profit? Seeing endless people of honor scrape out meagre existences while those who exploit others endlessly become billionaires is more enlightening to the worth of honor than our useless platitudes.

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I think the issue here is that you’ve tied a monetary value to honor, when honor is often tied to other things and occasionally explicitly the lack of a desire to maximize profit.

It's not monetarily valued. It's not societally valued, in any tangible sense. Power is not allocated to whomever has the most honor. So what good is it?

Some beliefs and values are personal, and thus, intangible. Try to recognize that not everything good in life has to be (or even can be) quantified.

This implies that power is the only good, which is a hell of a way to look at the world.

Do you only care about things that bring power to you personally? Or do you care about intangible values that are important to you as a human? One defines character and personality, the other is just a way to achieve personal gains.

Can you eat profit? What is the worth of a man besides his honor? What profiteth a man if he gaineth the whole world, but loseth his soul?

Apparently Bill Gates has the ability to buy his back given his current PR and general perception at around 130BN so seems like it might not be a bad play. ;)

It’s a fair question. I’d say that if/after you’ve made your millions you may soon find that your life is no less empty, and that internal substance - however intangible - is all there is. The exogenous manifestations of it are honour, duty, morality and so on. I think the Stoic literature best explains it if ever you’re interested.

Can you eat or sell happiness? What about contentment, satisfaction, meaning or purpose?

I mean, no skin off my back if you want to frame yourself as a cog in the economic machine, but surely there's more to life than materialism?

Am I perhaps misunderstanding your post and are you instead making a point about the disposable nature of men as a gender group?

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