Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Success gets treated like a clean noun, something you can point to on a resume and cash in for legitimacy. Berrigan takes a lit match to that fantasy. Calling it a "weasel word" is a deliberate moral accusation: the term slips its meaning depending on who is winning, who is selling, who needs to justify harm. It can mean wealth, fame, upward mobility, institutional approval; it rarely means goodness. The insult "horribly American" isn’t anti-patriotic so much as anti-mythology, aimed at a national religion of self-making that baptizes ambition and calls it virtue.

Then he sharpens the knife: "vamp". Success doesn’t merely mislead; it seduces and feeds. It promises safety, belonging, and admiration, but it drinks your attention, your conscience, your time. For a clergyman-activist like Berrigan, that’s the real spiritual danger: success becomes a rival god, a substitute for vocation. Once you accept its terms, you start editing your life for optics and rewards rather than truth.

The "death trap" line lands with the weight of someone who watched institutions bless violence and call it progress. Berrigan’s context matters: as a prominent anti-war priest, he was arrested, surveilled, and denounced precisely because he refused the respectable version of success offered by church, state, and career. The subtext is a warning to the well-intentioned: the trap isn’t failure. It’s thriving inside a system that trains you to mistake comfort for righteousness, and applause for a life worth defending.