Life & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

Cooley flips the usual moral hierarchy with a neat little ambush: we expect innocence to be the easy mark, but he insists the truly credulous are the supposedly sophisticated appetites. The line works because it insults the reader twice. First, it demotes innocence from naive liability to a kind of clarity. Second, it exposes lust and greed as not just vices but cognitive disabilities - desires so hungry they’ll swallow any story that promises a payoff.

The subtext is less Sunday-school than systems critique. Lust and greed don’t merely tempt; they recruit. They make people complicit in their own manipulation, because wanting something badly is a shortcut around skepticism. That’s why scams, propaganda, and predatory industries rarely pitch themselves to the pure-hearted. They aim for the already-invested: the person who needs the affair to be destiny, the investor who needs the miracle return to be plausible, the consumer who needs the status symbol to mean salvation. Desire turns doubt into an inconvenience.

Cooley’s aphoristic style - dry, compact, slightly cruel - places him in that late-20th-century tradition of writers who treat moral language as a tool for diagnosing self-deception rather than enforcing virtue. “Innocence” here isn’t sanctimony; it’s a lack of motive, which can be a kind of armor. The real gullibility, he suggests, belongs to adults who think they’re worldly precisely because they’ve learned to want.