Life & Wisdom Quote by Orson Scott Card

Card’s line is a neat little grenade: it flatters the middle class with moral agency while quietly accusing it of turning politics into a lifestyle accessory. “Luxury” is the key word. Causes aren’t framed as urgent necessities or principled commitments; they’re framed as discretionary spending. You don’t “have” a cause the way you have hunger, rent, or a hospital bill. You have it the way you have a gym membership: because your basic survival feels stable enough to allocate attention elsewhere.

The subtext is a class critique that cuts in two directions. On one hand, it’s an indictment of comfortable activism: the idea that some people can afford to be publicly moral because they’re buffered from consequences. On the other, it risks romanticizing the poor as too burdened to care, as if hardship automatically strips people of ideology, solidarity, or civic imagination. That’s where the quote courts controversy: it reads like empathy while also policing who gets to be “serious” about politics.

Context matters because Card’s career sits in the crossfire of speculative fiction’s big ethical questions and his own polarizing public stances. The line echoes a familiar conservative suspicion of elite and professional-class politics: that “causes” can become status signals, a way to purchase righteousness without paying the real price. It works rhetorically because it’s compact, faintly insulting, and plausible enough to feel like a hard truth - the kind that lets readers nod while they decide who the “middle class” is.