"Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them"
About this Quote
Toffler’s line lands because it yanks “profit” out of its glossy, investor-deck abstraction and drops it onto the factory floor. Sausages are engineered to be edible without being legible; their success depends on a consumer’s willingness not to ask too many questions. Profit, he implies, works the same way: a clean number that travels easily, detached from the messy inputs that made it possible.
The intent is not to moralize against making money so much as to expose the deliberate opacity baked into modern capitalism. “Esteemed most” is the knife twist. Admiration correlates with distance: the farther you are from the labor, the externalities, the supply-chain bargaining, the regulatory arbitrage, the layoffs, the waste, the shortcuts, the more “pure” profit looks. Knowledge complicates reverence because it restores causality. Once you see what got squeezed out - wages, time, safety, quality, communities - profit stops reading as achievement and starts reading as accounting.
Toffler’s broader context matters. As the futurist who chronicled “future shock,” he was preoccupied with systems growing too complex for ordinary citizens to track. This aphorism is a warning about asymmetry: corporations and technocrats can understand and manage the inputs; the public sees only the output, and is asked to applaud it. The sausage metaphor also hints at complicity. People like not knowing. The market rewards that preference with convenience, and the ideology of “shareholder value” supplies the applause track.
The intent is not to moralize against making money so much as to expose the deliberate opacity baked into modern capitalism. “Esteemed most” is the knife twist. Admiration correlates with distance: the farther you are from the labor, the externalities, the supply-chain bargaining, the regulatory arbitrage, the layoffs, the waste, the shortcuts, the more “pure” profit looks. Knowledge complicates reverence because it restores causality. Once you see what got squeezed out - wages, time, safety, quality, communities - profit stops reading as achievement and starts reading as accounting.
Toffler’s broader context matters. As the futurist who chronicled “future shock,” he was preoccupied with systems growing too complex for ordinary citizens to track. This aphorism is a warning about asymmetry: corporations and technocrats can understand and manage the inputs; the public sees only the output, and is asked to applaud it. The sausage metaphor also hints at complicity. People like not knowing. The market rewards that preference with convenience, and the ideology of “shareholder value” supplies the applause track.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
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