Thank you for your reply and for your suggestion. I will use and adapt the questions you gave me to talk about other virtues in the future as well. I appreciate it.

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>Our... system is in important respects very different from that of Aristotle’s time and place. Does Aristotle’s comment still apply?...

Aristotle's comments not only apply, I believe it is in fact dangerous that we ignore them to the extent we do.

The past several decades - especially regarding economic matters - have been the host of various sorts of liberation, i.e. various movements of deregulation. When these movements of deregulation happened, they were essentially experimental. We are always partially ignorant of what we are doing, we are always in a movement towards figuring it out. With that said, we do not need to become versed in statistical models to read what has been happening, we today measure the effects in our own lives.

To this effect, we once again get to learn the two lessons that our forefathers learned under feudalism and before it and after it several times, yet we always forget: (i) The powerful classes that emerge out of one community do not care to identify with the rest of their community. They would rather socialise only among themselves as well as with the powerful classes that emerge in other communities. (ii) the more degraded and demoralised the poor are, the more incapable they become to push back and at the same time the more resentful and vengeful they become.

Aristotle already knew these things and described them in his politics.

Generosity and friendship and some other virtues Aristotle mentions in the Nicomachean Ethics are behaviours that manifest in a society with a strong middle class. From what I remember - and without being able to point to the exact passage in the politics at the present moment - this Aristotle admits himself. Magnificence, on the other hand, is a virtue - I estimate - which contributes to having a middle class in the first place.

Now, I cannot claim that I am an expert on what happens when a society is left with a diminished middle class or even without one. I am also not an expert in what happens when we just let certain classes play the part of "owner" and some other classes play the part of "slave". I already see lots of the behaviours manifest which Aristotle describes in the 6th book of the Politics.

I recently had the opportunity to read Walter Benjamin's "The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility" and I came across this quote:

"The increasing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing for- mation of masses are two sides of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the prop- erty relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses-but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical out-come of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life."

As I look at my magic ball, all I can do is speculate that unless "we bring about the conditions which will incentivise the moneyed classes to become magnificent" we are instead doomed to bring about the conditions for personality cults and totalitarianism.

Thank you for reading. I look forward to your own insight or recommendations to reading other works.