Wealth & Money Quote by John Perkins

Confession is doing a lot of strategic work here. Perkins frames his moral collapse as both intimate and systemic: the guilt is constant, but the seduction is stronger. That pairing makes him legible to readers who want a whistleblower and, crucially, lets him keep a shred of self-awareness while still admitting he crossed lines. It is the language of a man trying to be credible without pretending to be pure.

The list is the tell: "drugs, sex, power, and money". It reads like tabloid bait, but it doubles as a map of how institutions recruit loyalty. These are not just vices; they are incentives, access, status, belonging. By stacking bodily pleasure beside political leverage and wealth, he collapses the distance between personal weakness and geopolitical machinery. The subtext is that corruption is rarely a single bribe in a smoky room. It is a lifestyle architecture that turns complicity into comfort, then makes discomfort feel like betrayal.

"I was seduced" also shifts agency in a careful way. He is not absolving himself, but he is implying an adversary: a system that knows exactly which buttons to push, especially on ambitious professionals trained to rationalize outcomes. Coming from an economist, the line lands with extra bite because it violates the field's self-image of cool rationality. The context around Perkins's public persona - the repentant insider narrating how development, debt, and corporate-government alliances can function as soft coercion - makes the admission feel less like a personal scandal than a business model.